March of the persons
by Tom Sullivan
This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows planet Earth as a point of light between the icy rings of Saturn. Close-up shows Earth and its moon. Image: NASA.
The study is the first attempt to model the destination of millions of potentially displaced migrants from heavily populated coastal communities.Hauer has people in New Orleans wondering where they might have to move. People from inland communities such as Phoenix and Austin are wondering too about who will be moving in next door. Counties in Wyoming and "western Montana, central Colorado and northern Utah" had better start planning too.
"We typically think about sea level rise as a coastal issue, but if people are forced to move because their houses become inundated, the migration could affect many landlocked communities as well," said the study's lead author, Mathew Hauer, who completed his doctoral degree in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geography.
While sea-level rise assessments are numerous and may help plan for the development of critical infrastructure, few research studies have grappled with where displaced people and families will go. No previous studies model how migration caused by sea-level rise will affect population other than in the directly affected coastal areas.
Image: Matthew Hauer, Nature Climate Change. Tick marks show the number of migrants (inflows and outflows) in thousands. States are ordered clockwise by the size of inflows. The top ten outflow states are colored; all other states are in grey.
While sailing in the Svalbard archipelago in the summer of 2014, Nicklen came upon large polar bear cubs that had starved to death. Then:Antarctica is normally a frozen desert, but it rained the whole time Nicklen was there. https://t.co/CWpHWPXUVn #EarthDay17
— BillMoyers.com (@BillMoyersHQ) April 22, 2017
“All of a sudden a blizzard came up, a massive storm — 80 knots of wind — so we had to go and hide,” Nicklen recalls. For protection, the best choice was to sail behind Nordaustlandet, a large, ice-covered island in the Svalbard archipelago. “And the temperature, even though we’re 600 miles from the North Pole, was 62 degrees Fahrenheit. And you’ve got all the waterfalls pouring off the Nordaustlandet ice cap.”Another report from Nature Climate Change last year predicted the effects could last twice as long as human history.
Nicklen snapped a photo — and, on this balmy day in the Arctic, captured a potent picture of climate change: A wall of ice in a steel-colored sea, with water pouring from the top of it.
“You go from the dead bears to this, and then look at the science — you come to understand that if we wait for the streets of New York or Miami to be flooded from rising sea levels, then we’ll be 200 years too late,” he says.