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Ice Melting Causes Big Changes In Sea Level

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Ice Melting Causes Big Changes In Sea Level

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The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting away due to the heating of the earth at a rapid rate. It is one of the biggest and fastest melting ice sheets on the earth, which in turn will drive sea levels up drastically over the next decade. If the ice fully melts, it will raise sea levels to up to 20 feet higher. A team of scientists voluntarily flew in on helicopter onto the ice sheet to take precise measurements of the melting ice. With all sets of data, the scientists can help create the most accurate measurements of the projected rate the sea level will rise. Their results concluded them to believing that the sea level will rise 20 feet overall. This will drastically affect the coast lines of many countries and continents.

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- The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, "the death rate is 100 percent," said Mr. Overstreet's friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet's task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland's ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

"We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions," said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. "But to really know what's happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field."

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet's warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Scientists know that the melting of Greenland is accelerating. As the temperature rises, large lakes form on the surface of the ice, which in turn create a network of rivers.

" The rivers melt down faster than the surrounding ice, like a knife through butter," Dr. Smith said.

The rivers then flow down into giant holes in the ice, called moulins, which drain through tunnels in the ice sheet and out into the ocean.

" The ice sheet is porous, like Swiss cheese," Dr. Smith said. "We didn't know that until this year."

This summer in Greenland, the scientists set up their camp on the ice, where they hoped to capture the first comprehensive measurements of the rate of melting.

Their research could yield valuable information to help scientists figure out how rapidly sea levels will rise in the 21st century, and thus how people in coastal areas from New York to Bangladesh could plan for the change.

Each year, the federal government spends about $1 billion to support Arctic and Antarctic research by thousands of scientists like Dr. Smith and his team. The agency officials who receive that money from Congress, including the directors of the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say the research is essential for understanding the changes that will affect the world's population and economies for more than a century.

But the research is under increasing fire by some Republican leaders in Congress, who deny or question the scientific consensus that human activities contribute to climate change.

Leading the Republican charge on Capitol Hill is Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the chairman of the House science committee, who has sought to cut $300 million from NASA's budget for earth science and has started an inquiry into some 50 National Science Foundation grants. On Oct. 13, the committee subpoenaed scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeking more than six years of internal deliberations, including "all documents and communications" related to the agency's measurement of climate change.

Any cuts could directly affect the work of Dr. Smith and his team, who are supported by a three-year, $778,000 grant from NASA, which must cover everything, including researchers' salaries, flights, food, computers, scientific instruments and camping, safety and extreme cold-weather gear. Every scientist, Dr. Smith said, is keenly aware that the research costs "a tremendous amount of taxpayer money."

Getting Ready

In July, Dr. Smith's team arrived in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, a dusty outpost of 512 people on the island's southwest coast, which serves as a base for researchers to prepare for fieldwork on the ice sheet.

The scientists were excited but anxious as they prepared to travel inland by helicopter to do the fieldwork at the heart of their research: For 72 hours, every hour on the hour, they would stand watch by a supraglacial watershed, taking measurements - velocity, volume, temperature and depth - from the icy bank of the rushing river.

"No one has ever collected a data set like this," Asa Rennermalm, a professor of geography at the Rutgers University Climate Institute who was running the project with Dr. Smith, told the team over a lunch of musk ox burgers at the Kangerlussuaq airport cafeteria.

Taking each measurement was so difficult and dangerous that it would require two scientists at a time, she said. They would have to plan a sleep schedule to ensure that a group was always awake to do the job. Everyone knew the team would be working just upriver from the moulin - the sinkhole that would sweep anyone who fell into it deep into the ice sheet.

The morning before their departure, the team gathered in a hangar to pack gear and provisions: tents, collapsible metal cots, generators, pickaxes, crampons, freeze-dried meals, a wealth of scientific instruments, vials for snow, ice and water samples, and a cooler to bring those samples back to labs in the United States.

They also took toilet paper and several plastic bottles, each labeled in marker with a large letter "P." The bottles were for the scientists to urinate in should they not want to go outside in below-freezing nighttime temperatures to the open-air "toilet" on the ice. Afterward they would serve a practical purpose, as hot water bottles tucked into sleeping bags.

Not least, they packed a pair of 10-pound aerial drones, to map the icy watersheds.

Every item was weighed and reweighed since the helicopter could carry no more than 360 kilograms - 794 pounds - and would have to make several trips. Dr. Smith's NASA grant covered 10 hours of helicopter flight time, including the pilot's fee, at a cost of about $5,000 per hour.

The scale brought bad news: The gear was far too heavy. "Now we start getting rid of things," Dr. Smith said grimly as he and the team began jettisoning extra food, utensils and blankets. They scaled down to the barest essentials and anxiously reweighed the items: 359.9 kilograms.

At last the helicopter took off with the team's gear hanging from an attached net sling. The scientists gazed at the seemingly endless surface of the ice, beneath the chopper, spreading in all directions, threaded with aquamarine rivers and lakes. After a 40-minute flight, the pilot cautiously bounced the helicopter on the ice, making sure it was hard enough to land on.

Stepping out, the scientists were hit by the cold of the Greenland summer - the temperature ranged from 26 to 40 degrees while they were there - a constant wind and the glare of the sun.

As the researchers began to set up camp, Mr. Overstreet, the University of Wyoming doctoral student, headed toward the river, silent as it sliced through the ice. More than any other member of the team, the success of the mission rested on his shoulders.

Mr. Overstreet, 31, who grew up kayaking and rafting in Oregon, had designed the complex rope-and-pulley system - modeled on swift-water boat rescue systems - that would be crucial to gleaning data from the treacherous waters. Before coming to Greenland, he spent months refining and practicing his rope system on rivers in Wyoming.

The team soon got to work. A helicopter pilot flew two of Mr. Overstreet's colleagues, Mr. Pitcher and Matthew Cooper, both of the University of California, Los Angeles, across the 60-foot river. On the opposite bank they drilled into the ice, attached an anchor and harnessed themselves to it for safety. They attached a nylon line to the anchor, with the rest of the line coiled in a heavy bag.

Now came the crucial part: The men took turns hurling the bag across the river, but it repeatedly fell into the water. After an anxious half-hour, Mr. Cooper finally got the rope across. Mr. Overstreet caught it and began setting up the rope-and-pulley system he had been testing for so long.

Farther upstream, Dr. Smith cast what looked like three small, round life preservers into the river. At $3,000 each, they were equipped with waterproof computers, GPS and sonar depth technology, all to beam back information about the river's elevation, speed, depth and more. But the drifters were on kamikaze missions. After sending back the measurements, they would be swept into the moulin.

"That's 3,000 taxpayer dollars, going down the hole," Dr. Smith said.

On the edge of the camp, Johnny Ryan, a doctoral candidate in geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales, launched an airplane-shaped drone from a slingshot-like device, then guided it over a nearly 75-square-mile area. But then the drone went silent. "It stopped talking to me, and now it's crashed in the wilderness," Mr. Ryan said.

Mr. Ryan, who wore a hot-pink knit cap and purple sunglasses that set off his bright red beard, launched his backup drone. Feeling stressed, he monitored its flight nervously as the hours rolled by, drinking cups of tea to keep warm.

At the riverbank, Mr. Overstreet and Mr. Pitcher started the data collection by clipping a computer device that looked like a boogie board to the line running across the river. Every hour they sent it back and forth to measure the water's depth, velocity and temperature.

But as the day stretched into night, the device's battery, sapped by the cold, began to die. By now the sun had dropped lower, filling the sky with a spectacular orange glow. The scientists were worried - the death of the battery would mean the death of their mission.

An idea occurred to Mr. Overstreet. He found a roll of heat-reflecting silver sheeting at the camp and wrapped it around the boogie board battery. During the next run across the river, it stayed alive.

But the battery continued to wane, so Mr. Pitcher pulled out gel hand warmers from his gloves and tucked them into the battery's silver jacket. Success. The battery stayed warm and functional.

For the rest of their time on the ice, the scientists would have to ration the hand warmers. Saving the life of the battery would save the mission to record the first comprehensive on-the-ground, empirical data on the flow of a river off the ice sheet.

The scientists will use the data, which they expect to publish in the coming months, to test whether climate models are accurate.

The data can then be used to create a new model to estimate the amount of water flowing from thousands of similar rivers.

The data gathered from the river at the top of the sheet will be compared with measurements the scientists have taken at its foot.

With both sets of data, the scientists can help create the most accurate projections to date of the rate of sea level rise.

They might even learn, Dr. Smith said, that the water is refreezing within the ice sheet and that sea levels are actually rising more slowly than models project.

For three days and three nights, the scientists continued to measure the river, as up to 430,000 gallons of water a minute poured off the ice and into the moulin. On the final morning, the team, tired but elated, gathered by the river as the boogie board made its final trip. By then, Mr. Ryan's backup drone had safely completed its mapping mission. Mr. Overstreet broke open a celebratory bag of dried mangoes - a lavish treat for the ice campers.

"It's hard to make the choice to come on projects like this, but everything in my life has prepared me to come out here," Mr. Overstreet said. "We go from battling the river to working with it, and then we learn so much from it."

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The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

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Rising Sea Levels Are Washing Towns Away

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Rising Sea Levels Are Washing Towns Away

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In Norfolk, Virginia, tidal waves are consuming the coast which contains a major amount of roads for the town. The only road to Tybee Island, along the Atlantic Coast, is disappearing under the sea multiple times per year. Because of this, the town gets cut off from the mainland regularly. In Fort Laderdale, Florida tidal flooding is making the city spend millions of dollars to fix roads and drains. Scientists have been warming the U.S. for years about how global warming would soon effect the U.S.'s coastlines, and now it is finally happening. These cities affected now have to create climate plans which entail how they are going to respond to these rising sea levels which in turn are destroying their towns. Congress has largely ignored the many pleas for help from these small towns, and many more cities in the U.S. are at risk on the coast. The final solution is to "give up and leave." Sounds pretty sad that millions of people and families could soon be affected by something that Congress is ignoring.

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NORFOLK, Va. - Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through.

Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.

And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains - and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets.

For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States' coastline.

Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.

Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding - often called "sunny-day flooding" - along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.

These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water.

In coastal regions, that compounds the damage from the increasingly heavy rains plaguing the country, like those that recently caused extensive flooding in Louisiana. Scientists say these rains are also a consequence of human greenhouse emissions.

"Once impacts become noticeable, they're going to be upon you quickly," said William V. Sweet, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is among the leaders in research on coastal inundation. "It's not a hundred years off - it's now."

Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Miami Beach is leading the way, increasing local fees to finance a $400 million plan that includes raising streets, installing pumps and elevating sea walls.

In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm.

"I'm a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising," said Jason Buelterman, the mayor of tiny Tybee Island, one of the first Georgia communities to adopt a detailed climate plan.

But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time.

Yet Congress has largely ignored these pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a "radical climate change agenda."

The gridlock in Washington means the United States lacks not only a broad national policy on sea-level rise, it has something close to the opposite: The federal government spends billions of taxpayer dollars in ways that add to the risks, by subsidizing local governments and homeowners who build in imperiled locations along the coast.

As the problem worsens, experts are warning that national security is on the line. Naval bases, in particular, are threatened; they can hardly be moved away from the ocean, yet much of their land is at risk of disappearing within this century.

"It's as if the country was being attacked along every border, simultaneously," said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Florida and one of the world's leading experts on rising seas. "It's a slow, gradual attack, but it threatens the safety and security of the United States."

'We're Living It'

One night eight years ago, Karen Speights, a Norfolk resident, was sitting at the dinner table with her mother, eating crab legs dipped in butter and a tangy sauce. She felt a tingle.

"Ma!" she cried. "My feet are wet!"

Her mother laughed, but then she felt it, too: a house that had not flooded since the family moved there in 1964 was soon awash in saltwater. Ms. Speights initially hoped that flood was a fluke. Instead, it turned out to be the first of three to hit their home in less than a decade.

Nowadays, Ms. Speights, an administrative worker at a utility company, is wondering how to get her and her mother out of the neighborhood before the water comes again, without taking too much of a financial hit. And she pays more attention to problems that once seemed remote, like warnings from scientists about the rising sea.

"I believe it because we're living it," Ms. Speights said as she sat on her sofa, nodding toward the nearby tidal marsh that sent water into her living room. "The water has to be rising if we never flooded, and all of a sudden we've flooded three times in eight years."

Because the land is sinking as the ocean rises, Norfolk and the metropolitan region surrounding it, known as Hampton Roads, are among the worst-hit parts of the United States. That local factor means, in essence, that the region is a few decades ahead in feeling the effects of sea-level rise, and illustrates what people along the rest of the American coast can expect.

The biggest problems involve frequent flooding of homes and roads. As the sea rises, hundreds of tidal creeks and marshes that thread through the region are bringing saltwater to people's doorsteps.

This summer, on a driving tour of Norfolk and nearby towns, William A. Stiles Jr. pointed to the telltale signs that the ocean is gradually invading the region.

He spotted crusts of dried salt in the streets, and salt-loving marsh grasses that are taking over suburban yards. He pointed out trees killed by seawater. He stood next to one of the road signs that Norfolk has been forced to install in recent years, essentially huge vertical rulers so people know the depth of floodwaters at low-lying intersections.

"There's just more and more visible impacts: water on the street, water that won't clear from the ditch, these intense rain events, higher tides," Mr. Stiles said.

"It's beginning to catch the attention of citizens, restaurant owners, business people, politicians. There's just much more of a conversation, and it's not just in the politically safe places. It's everywhere."

Mr. Stiles, known as Skip, heads a local environmental group, Wetlands Watch. At his suggestion, students at two local universities began looking at the neighborhood where Ms. Speights lives, Chesterfield Heights. It has had little history of flooding, but that is starting to change as the water rises.

The plan the students developed has morphed into an ambitious program to safeguard the neighborhood, and another nearby, for decades. The Obama administration recently gave Virginia more than $100 million to carry the plan out. The administration has also enlisted one of the universities, Old Dominion in Norfolk, to spearhead a broad effort at better planning.

But the size of that grant illustrates the scope of the problem confronting the region, and the country: protecting a single neighborhood from rising water can easily cost tens of millions of dollars. Sea walls and streets may have to be raised, or movable gates built along waterways so they can be closed at times of high water.

While the Obama administration is trying to create a few showcase neighborhoods, there is no sign Congress is prepared to spend the money that cities and states say they need: tens of billions of dollars just to catch up to the current flooding problems, much less get ahead of them. Norfolk alone, a town of 250,000 people, has a wish list of $1.2 billion - or about $5,000 for every man, woman and child in the city.

As the national response lags, experts warn that the flooding is putting the country's defense at risk.

Several studies have concluded that Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base, is profoundly threatened by rising seas, as are other coastal bases. The Pentagon has managed to build floodgates and other protective measures at some facilities. But attempts by the military to develop broader climate change plans have met fierce resistance in Congress.

That was the case this summer, when an effort by the Pentagon to appoint officers to take charge of climate resilience led to a House vote prohibiting taxpayer money from being spent on the plan.

"When we distract our military with a radical climate change agenda, we detract from their main purpose of defending America from enemies" like the Islamic State, said Mr. Buck of Colorado, the Republican congressman who sponsored the measure. His amendment passed the House 216 to 205, though the Senate has yet to agree to it.

Many people in Congress, almost all of them Republicans, express doubt about climate science, with some of them promulgating conspiracy theories claiming that researchers have invented the issue to justify greater governmental control over people's lives. So far, this ideological position has been immune to the rising evidence of harm from human-induced climate change.

The Obama administration has been pushing federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to take more aggressive steps. But without action in Congress, experts say these efforts fall far short of what is required.

"In the country, certainly in the Congress, it hasn't really resonated - the billions and perhaps trillions of dollars that we would need to spend if we want to live on the coast like we're living today," said David W. Titley, a retired rear admiral who was the chief oceanographer of the Navy, and now heads a climate center at Pennsylvania State University.

"I haven't seen any evidence that there is serious thought about this: What does a world of three, four, five feet of sea-level rise look like?"

Mounting Evidence

Deep in a thicket of trees on an out-of-the-way island in the Florida Keys, a diesel engine roared to life. Soon a drill bit was chewing through ancient limestone, pulling up evidence from the geological past that might shed light on the future of the planet.

On a sultry day in March, Dr. Dutton, the University of Florida scientist, stood watch over the drilling operation, inspecting her samples as they emerged from the ground. She spotted fossilized corals, proof that what is now the dry ground of Lignumvitae Key was once underwater.

With taxpayer funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Dutton is chasing what might be the most urgent question in climate science: How fast is the ocean going to rise?

"Is it going to happen in decades, or centuries, or a thousand years?" Dr. Dutton asked as she took a break to eat lunch on a tarpaulin spread under the trees. "This will give us an example to say, 'Well, the last time this happened, here is how long it took.'"

The opponents of climate science in Congress, and the tiny group of climate researchers allied with them, have argued that the concerns of thousands of mainstream scientists about the future are based on unproven computer forecasts.

In reality, their concerns are based in large part on mounting evidence of what has happened in the past.

Through decades of research, it has become clear that human civilization, roughly 6,000 years old, developed during an unusually stable period for global sea levels. But over longer spans, coastlines have been much more dynamic.

During ice ages, caused by wobbles in the Earth's orbit, sea levels dropped more than 400 feet as ice piled up on land. But during periods slightly warmer than today, the sea may have risen 70 or more feet above the current level.

Dr. Dutton and other leading scientists are focused on the last sea-level high point, which occurred between the last two ice ages, about 125,000 years ago.

After years of surveying ancient shorelines around the world, scientists determined that the sea level rose by something like 20 to 30 feet in that era, compared with today. But how long did it take to make that jump? That is the question Dr. Dutton, using improved research techniques, wants to answer.

Large parts of the Florida Keys are simply ancient coral reefs that grew during the period of high seas, and were exposed when the levels fell. Trees, roads and houses now sit atop the old reefs. By recovering samples, Dr. Dutton hopes to date a sequence of corals as they grew along with the rising sea, potentially revealing the rate at which the water rose.

The research, likely to take years, may supply a figure for how quickly the ocean was able to rise under past conditions, but not necessarily a maximum rate for the coming decades. The release of greenhouse gases from human activity is causing the planet to warm rapidly, perhaps faster than at any other time in the Earth's history. The ice sheets in both Greenland and West Antarctica are beginning to melt into the sea at an accelerating pace.

Scientists had long hoped that any disintegration of the ice sheets would take thousands of years, but recent research suggests the breakup of West Antarctica could occur much faster. In the worst-case scenario, this research suggests, the rate of sea-level rise could reach a foot per decade by the 22nd century, about 10 times faster than today.

In 2013, scientists reached a consensus that three feet was the highest plausible rise by the year 2100. But now some of them are starting to say that six or seven feet may be possible. A rise that large over a span of decades would be an unparalleled national catastrophe, driving millions of people from their homes and most likely requiring the abandonment of entire cities.

In essence, by revealing how sensitive the ice sheets have been to past warming, Dr. Dutton's research may answer the question of whether such a rapid jump is possible.

Along those parts of the United States coast that are sinking at a brisk clip, including southern Louisiana and the entire Chesapeake Bay region, including Norfolk, the situation will be worse than average. On the Pacific Coast, a climate pattern that had pushed billions of gallons of water toward Asia is now ending, so that in coming decades the sea is likely to rise quickly off states like Oregon and California.

Along the East Coast, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that many communities have already, or will soon, pass a threshold where sunny-day flooding starts to happen much more often.

"When you look at the historical record, there's no trend saying the flooding is going down," said Dr. Sweet, the NOAA expert. "The trends are all very clear. They're going up, and they're going up in many of these areas in an accelerating fashion."

Late last year, in Paris, nations reached a landmark global agreement to cut emissions. It is fragile, and might not survive if Donald J. Trump is elected president in November; he has pledged to scrap it.

But the air is already so full of greenhouse gases that most land ice on the planet has started to melt. So even if the deal survives, it will, at best, slow the rise of the sea and perhaps limit the ultimate increase. Many climate scientists, including Dr. Dutton, believe a rise of at least 15 or 20 feet has already become inevitable, over an unknown period.

Facing Hard Decisions

As Brad Tuckman walked the piece of land in Fort Lauderdale where he is building a grand new house, he pointed toward the canal that wraps around three sides of the property.

It is scenic, with yachts plying the water, yet as the sea has risen, street flooding in the area has become a recurring nuisance. So before starting construction, Mr. Tuckman said he spent nearly a half-million dollars to raise the sea wall and truck in dirt to elevate the land.

"The predictions of what's going to happen over the next 20, 30, 40 years - it's real," said Mr. Tuckman, the founder of a company offering creative services to the retail industry.

In South Florida, among the worst-hit parts of the country for sunny-day flooding, people are not waiting for state or federal help. Those who can afford it are starting to act on their own. A company, Coastal Risk Consulting, has cropped up to advise them, and is offering its services nationally.

Cities and counties in the region have formed an alliance and enlisted professors to help them figure out what to do. They are hiring "chief resilience officers," an idea pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, which is paying some of the salary cost.

In Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, as well as in older Northern cities like Boston and New York, tidal marshes and creeks were filled in a century or more ago to make new land, and it is in these areas - "back bays," as some of these spots are called - where the flooding is happening first.

That is because they remain the lowest spots in the landscape, vulnerable to the rising water nearby. Old drain pipes empty into the tidal creeks, and at high tide the water can back up through these pipes, bubbling into the streets seemingly from nowhere.

In Miami Beach, the city engineer, Bruce A. Mowry, has come up with a plan for combating the flooding. He rips up problematic streets, raises them with extra dirt and repaves them, installing new drains and giant pumps that can push water back into the bay. The approach has already been shown to work in several neighborhoods.

A controversy has erupted about whether Miami Beach is polluting Biscayne Bay with the water, but the city is pushing ahead. Miami Beach plans to spend at least $400 million on its plan by 2018, raising the money through fees imposed on homes and businesses.

The huge county government for the region, Miami-Dade County, is developing its own resilience strategy, one likely to cost billions. It has committed to rebuilding some of its decaying infrastructure, like a sewage plant, in a way that safeguards against sea-level rise and storm surges.

"I don't see doom and gloom here; I see opportunity," said Harvey Ruvin, the clerk of courts for Miami-Dade County, who has been a leading voice on the environment in Florida for a half-century, and who recently led a county task force on sea-level rise. "We're talking about the most robust possible jobs program you can think of, and one that can't be outsourced."

Many of the Republican mayors in the region are on the same page as Democrats in requesting national and state action on climate change, as well as pushing local steps. James C. Cason, the Republican mayor of Coral Gables, has convened informational sessions that draw hundreds of residents, and he has received no complaints for his stance.

"I hope in coming years when we have to spend a lot of money, the citizens will still support it," Mr. Cason said in an interview.

Still, his city, and others in South Florida, have some hard decisions to make.

Some property owners cannot afford to raise their sea walls, putting their neighborhoods at increased risk of flooding. Will they be held legally responsible when floods do occur? A strict policy could force some people from their homes. Conversely, should public money be spent to do the work, even if it largely benefits private property?

Just for streets, storm drains and the like, South Florida governments will need to raise billions, and they have yet to figure out how. Moreover, if the rise of the sea accelerates as much as some scientists fear, it is doubtful the cities will be able to keep up.

The region has one mayor, Philip K. Stoddard of South Miami, who is a scientist himself - he studies animal communication at Florida International University - and has been a close reader of scientific papers about climate change since the 1990s.

"I remember lying in bed at night thinking, 'I hope this isn't real,'" Dr. Stoddard, a Democrat, recalled. "I hope other data comes in that contradicts it. It took me several years to get my head around it and say, 'Oh, God, it is real.'"

Now he is focused on easing the pain for South Miami, with a $50 million system of sewer pipes to replace septic tanks threatened by the rising water table.

"You can play it really badly and let unpleasant things happen earlier," he said. "Or you can push them off by doing some infrastructure repairs and some thoughtful planning."

He is, though, under no illusions about the long-term fate of the region he calls home.

"We're putting enough heat in the ocean to send water over us, no question," Dr. Stoddard said. "Ultimately, we give up and we leave. That's how the story ends."

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Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun

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NORFOLK, Va. - Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through. Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.

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Scientists have found the largest peatland in the tropics, based in the Congo Basin in Central Africa. It has been accumulation for over 10,000 years. About 30 billion metric tons of carbon are found in this area. The peat covers 55,000 square miles and goes 20 feet deep into the ground. This area contains roughly the same amount of carbon as the atmosphere does. This area is very susceptible to land-use changes which will cause global warming. Scientists fear the land could be harmed and cause even more global warming, and they want too be proactive in avoiding land-usage as much as possible in these volatile areas.

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Scientists have mapped what they say is the largest peatland in the tropics, an area larger than New York State in the Congo Basin in Central Africa.

The peat, which consists of slowly decomposing vegetation in swamp forests, has been accumulating for more than 10,000 years. As in all peatlands, the vegetation is a natural storehouse of carbon taken from the atmosphere - in this case, about 30 billion metric tons of carbon, or roughly equivalent to the carbon in two decades of fossil fuel emissions in the United States.

"It's astonishing to me that in 2017 we can be making these kinds of discoveries," said Simon Lewis, a professor at the University of Leeds in England and an author of a study on the peatlands being published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Dr. Lewis and his colleagues first discovered the peatlands several years ago, working on a hunch that in the wetlands known as the Cuvette Centrale, which straddle the border of the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they would find peat in layers under the swamps. The vegetation, which is waterlogged year-round, lacks oxygen and other nutrients that would lead to its quick decomposition.

The current study used satellite imaging and analysis to determine the extent of the peat, which is about 55,000 square miles. Field work across the wetlands - which Dr. Lewis said were the most difficult expeditions he had undertaken in 15 years of research in Africa - revealed the depth of the peat, up to 20 feet, allowing a calculation of the amount of stored carbon.

Peat covers only about 3 percent of Earth's land surface, but because it stores carbon over a long time, it contains as much carbon as all of the world's plants and trees, and almost as much as the atmosphere.

Most peatlands are in northern regions, including Alaska, Canada and Russia. But tropical peatlands, especially, are highly vulnerable to land-use changes and climate warming, both of which can lead to the peat drying out and decomposing quickly, which would release the carbon back into the atmosphere.

Vast tracts of peat in Indonesia, for instance, have been drained for oil-palm production, leading to fires and rapid carbon release. In the fall of 2015, Indonesia peat fires released more carbon per day than the European Union.

The Congo Basin peatlands are in a relatively inaccessible area and are largely undisturbed. But scientists and environmentalists fear that the same kinds of pressures affecting Indonesia could eventually affect the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, which store about 30 percent of the carbon found in tropical peatlands worldwide.

Emma J. Stokes, who directs the Central Africa program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that protecting the peatlands was crucial, as the swamp forests that overlie them are home to many animals, including some of the highest densities of lowland gorillas anywhere.

The area's inaccessibility was "one of the reasons it's been afforded natural protections over the years," said Dr. Stokes, who was not involved in the study.

"But I don't think we can sit back and relax and say that everything's going to be fine," she said. "We definitely need to be proactive in avoiding any kind of land-use decisions that will risk impacting on these forests and peatlands."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientists Map Vast, Carbon-Rich Peatlands in Congo Basin. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Scientists Map Vast Peat Swamps, a Storehouse of Carbon, in Central Africa

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Scientists have mapped what they say is the largest peatland in the tropics, an area larger than New York State in the Congo Basin in Central Africa. The peat, which consists of slowly decomposing vegetation in swamp forests, has been accumulating for more than 10,000 years.

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Trump is a big supporter and advocate of the oil, gas and coal industries. He plans to destroy the Clean Power Plan created by Barack Obama, which required states to create less carbon dioxide emissions from their power plants. Regardless of what Trump plans to do in order to get rid of this plan, he will most likely have a lawsuit against him. His only possible solution is to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, which may not be a fast moving plan by Trump. He also plans to cut the Waters of the U.S. rule, which tries to clarify which waterways are under federal environmental protection. Environmental groups will most likely file a lawsuit in order to preserve the rule. Lastly, he wants to ask TransCanada Corp to remake their application to build the Keystone XL pipeline. This probably wouldn't pass since Obama's administration had to turn it down after environmental lobbying occurred against it. Trump plans to do many other things that will overturn what the Obama Administration created/denied, and he seems to be a little bit ahead of himself.

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The U.S. Intervenes With Global Warming?

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The U.S. Intervenes With Global Warming?

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For the first time ever, the White House has recommended research in geoengineering. This concept will hopefully slow down or reverse global warming/climate change. Research calls for thirteen agencies of the U.S. to look into two major approaches of geoengineering: putting chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect heat produced from sunlight away from earth, and to remove CO2 from the air so the atmosphere is unable to trap as much heat. The report was submitted by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which provides insight into the science necessary for understanding climate intervention and geoengineering. The only potential problem is that under a new president (Trump) people are worried that the plan may not carry through as intended.

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The report is an advisory one, and its recommendations face an uncertain future under the incoming Donald J. Trump administration. Mr. Trump has called climate change a hoax and has named people to his cabinet who deny the scientific consensus on global warming, so it is unclear how concerned the new administration will be with technologies to counter it.

David W. Keith, a Harvard physicist who has proposed a small-scale geoengineering experiment, said he was pleased that the call for research was included in the report. "Though - of course - worried about consequences under Trump," he wrote in an email.

But the concept of manipulating the atmosphere stirs controversy beyond partisan politics.

Opponents of the idea, including many scientists, argue the risks are too great: Geoengineering might have unintended damaging effects on weather patterns, or it might be used unilaterally as a weapon by governments or even extremely wealthy individuals.

Many environmentalists have opposed geoengineering research on the ground it would be a distraction from the task of reducing the impact of climate change by cutting carbon emissions in the first place. Others say scientists should at least be getting a head start on research in case geoengineering is someday needed.

Far from calling for any test of geoengineering methods, the report has much more modest recommendations, including research to improve how computer models represent the interaction of clouds and aerosol particles of the type that someday might be used to reflect sunlight.

Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute, a Washington research group, said in an email that the recommendations were only a "very first step of what is needed - given the faster than projected severe impacts that are emerging."

Still, the recommendations illustrate how far the subject of geoengineering has come in official circles. For years, the Obama administration avoided mentioning the term after the White House science adviser, John Holdren, drew criticism for saying in 2009 that geoengineering measures should not be "off the table." But a government-sponsored panel of the National Academy of Sciences recommended in 2015 that some geoengineering research be allowed, with proper oversight.

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us global change research program (usgcrp)

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White House Urges Research on Geoengineering to Combat Global Warming

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The report is an advisory one, and its recommendations face an uncertain future under the incoming Donald J. Trump administration. Mr. Trump has called climate change a hoax and has named people to his cabinet who deny the scientific consensus on global warming, so it is unclear how concerned the new administration will be with technologies to counter it.

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Warsaw is being met with a rather difficult problem to solve this month. Not only has smog affected countries like India and China, but the issue has now increased over Europe. It took only a half a day for the smog in Warsaw, Poland to reach record breaking highs since Poland put into place an air pollution monitoring system. Pollution levels eventually dropped toward the end of the week, but officials advised residents of Warsaw to stay inside as much as possible and even offered free transportation so that few cars traveled on the roads. 33 of the European Union's 50 most polluted cities are in Poland due to its coal mining industry.  The Prime Minister plans to put into affect ways of controlling this pollution, but didn't state any specifics. This seems like it is going to be an ongoing problem for Poland, and could amount to much worse things if the rest of Europe is affected in the near future.

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The issue, though, is not just cars and coal. Warsaw's spike in air pollution was driven largely by a severe cold snap that forced thousands of private households, especially the most destitute ones, to crank up poor quality heaters that burn things like coal and garbage to beat back the winter chill.

"Eighty percent of all households in Warsaw are connected to a district heating network," said Michal Olszewski, deputy mayor of Warsaw. "The problem is the remaining 20 percent that often use these low-tech heating systems."

According to Poland's Central Statistical Office, this could be the case in over 150,000 households in a city with 1.7 million residents.

The situation got out of hand in the first week of January after a Siberian blast poured into the region and temperatures dropped below zero Fahrenheit. People overworked their heaters, and an absence of wind caused the smog to squat gloomily over the capital.

For most of three days, according to data collected by the Regional Inspectorate for Environmental Protection in Warsaw, air quality in the city was either "bad" or "very bad," meaning the entire population was likely to be affected and some people could have experienced serious health effects.

On average, readings of fine particulates in the air exceeded Polish environmental norms by fourfold, at some points reaching 1,000 percent of the norms.

But this may well understate the problem. Ilona Jedrasik from ClientEarth, a nonprofit environmental law organization, said that some air pollution monitors in the region simply stopped working because of the high concentration of pollutants.

High smog levels, Warsaw authorities warned, could be especially dangerous for children, older residents, pregnant women and people with existing health issues.

Szymon Wisniak, 33, a financial expert, left his car at home on Monday so he wouldn't "contribute to this mess of a situation."

As he was waiting for a train in the city center on Monday night, he said that more than half of his Facebook feed was about the smog.

"Many of my friends and I woke up to this smoky smell in our houses," he said. "At first, I thought something was on fire, but then I looked out the window and there was this scary grayness."

Other regions in Poland are even worse. In the southern city of Rybnik, alarming air pollution levels led officials to offer free public transportation and shut down schools and kindergartens.

The health consequences of such a high level of pollutants in the air can be severe, including failure of the respiratory and circulatory system, heart attacks and strokes. In fact, the European Environment Agency estimated last year that bad air was responsible for almost 45,000 premature deaths a year in Poland.

Magdalena Urban, a 25-year-old marketing specialist in Warsaw, said on Monday evening that she had been suffering from a headache since last Sunday.

"It hurts around the temples and I'm constantly feeling nauseated," Ms. Urban said as she went grocery shopping in Zabki, a town just outside the capital. "I'm going out shopping because I don't know what else to do. This has all been so sudden."

Beata Szydlo, the prime minister, said on Monday that her government was going to work on ways of reducing a problem that "is so very burdensome for the Polish citizens," though she did not provide any specifics.

Mr. Olszewski said that the mayor's office was already doing a lot to tackle the problem, but it needs "tools that only the central government can provide."

"Poland's economy needs to be decarbonized, but the government does the complete opposite," Mr. Olszewski said. "Plus, they take away our environmental competences. Only recently they lifted restrictions on tree felling in Warsaw and we can't even say no to that."

Ms. Jedrasik said that first of all, regulations needed to be put in place regarding the quality of fuel and furnaces people use in their houses, as well as the building insulation.

"And then," she said, "we need effective ways of executing those rules and ensuring that people comply with them."

Konstanty Radziwill, the Polish health minister, caused controversy at the beginning of the year - before the pollution levels radically increased - when he called the smog "a theoretical problem" and said that "there are no reasons for panic," and besides "our lifestyle is much more damaging."

"Someone who breathes in air smoking a cigarette, with fumes and everything that comes with it, is in a position in which complaining about poor air quality is not credible at all," Mr. Radziwill told a private radio station, Tok FM.

However, according to estimates by Warsaw Without Smog, an environmental group, residents of the capital inhale the equivalent of a thousand cigarettes a year. It is even worse in the towns on the outskirts of Warsaw, where people breathe in an equivalent of up to 2,400 cigarettes a year, or 6.5 a day.

Agnieszka Drozd, an activist with another environmental organization, Warsaw Smog Alarm, said that "no one is exempt from this damage."

"Think of your children smoking a couple of cigarettes a day," she said. "It's that bad."

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The issue, though, is not just cars and coal. Warsaw's spike in air pollution was driven largely by a severe cold snap that forced thousands of private households, especially the most destitute ones, to crank up poor quality heaters that burn things like coal and garbage to beat back the winter chill.