Rico's rants: Unexpected waterfront property

15 December 2014

Unexpected waterfront property

Seattle, Washington cartographer and urban planner Jeffery Linn has a FastCompany article (with lots of great maps) of what certain places will look like when global warming melts all the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic:

Portland, Oregon, may not be a coastal city but, if all of the world's ice sheets melted, it would still end up mostly underwater. Jeffery Linn has mapped out what Portland, Oregon and several other cities would look like with maximum sea level rise.
Each map includes newly named islands and bays, like the Chula del Mar in San Diego, California. In Los Angeles, California, the city of Downey has become Drowney, and the airport is Ex-LAX. The map also notates where landmarks like Disneyland and the Miracle Mile would end up in the newly formed bay.
The mapmaker was inspired by a similar map by a San Francisco, California blogger. "I'd always been fascinated by what the world would look like with a sea level rise," Linn says. "I was very impressed with his take on it. So I stole his concept."
The maps show a very long-term vision of the future, but point to what's happening today. "These maps are an extreme scenario, and it would probably happen thousands of years in the future," Linn says. "I think that the real damage comes long before this extreme final point."
By 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea level rise between two and three feet; other climate scientists say it might be as much as four feet, and nearly ten feet by 2300. And while that's not enough to drown Portland, it's sufficient to devastate coastal cities.
"I hope that the dramatic nature of these maps, and sort of the humorous take on things might get into the minds of more people than might otherwise think about this," Linn says. So far, Linn has created maps for six cities, and is interested in going farther. "I've been thinking it would be really cool to do an atlas of cities worldwide," he says.