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Higher sea levels mean more flood damage from storms like Isabel, experts say
Posted by Times Dispatch: REX SPRINGSTON on September 15th, 2013
Times-Dispatch: Whether or not climate change leads to an increase in big hurricanes, one destructive effect of global warming is already at work in coastal Virginia -- rising sea levels.
As sea levels go up, flooding from even low-level storms will become more destructive, scientists say.
“At times I think we get too locked in on the strongest storms, the Category 3, 4 and 5s,” said Marshall Shepherd, a University of Georgia atmospheric scientist. “But if you look at the last five or 10 years, even the weaker...
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Jamestown faces a future of rising tides
Posted by Times Dispatch: REX SPRINGSTON on March 11th, 2013
Times Dispatch: Nature has always been cruel here.
Bad drinking water and mosquitoes, among other problems, bedeviled those who created in 1607 the first permanent English settlement in North America.
Today the land itself is at risk, threatened by rising sea levels aided by a warming climate.
Most of Jamestown occupies an island that lies 3 feet or less above the tidal James River. If current projections hold, all of that low land will be underwater by 2100, and much of the island will be increasingly...