A study led by NASA has established parts of the California coast that sink in the ocean, including large cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The Golden State is the most densely populated in the US with nearly 40 million inhabitants, including 68 percent of the Californians who live along the coast.
Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) worked together to investigate which parts of California are the most vulnerable to the rise in sea level.
The results showed that in 2050 the sea level will rise more than twice as much as previously expected in parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
That is because the country in these areas actually shifts down as the sea level rises as a result of climate change, which means that the speed of immersion is intensification.
In the next 25 years, sinking could lead to more than a foot sea level rise in and around Los Angeles, and up to 17 centimeters in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, such as the city of San Rafael.
That is about double the earlier regional estimates for these metro lines of 6.7 and 7.4 inch respectively.
In San Rafael, only one foot sea level rise would flood entire neighborhoods, shopping centers and even some schools, according to the viewer of Noaa's sea level rise.
On their latest map of the state, NASA scientists revealed the country most, with those areas of California that emphasized the deepest in dark and dark shades of blue.
Scientists mapped land (shown in blue) in cities in the coast of California and in parts of the central valley. NASA also followed where the site increased, a condition called uplift (shown in red)
Main author Marin Govorcin, an external detection scientist at NASA JPL, said in a statement: “In many parts of the world, just like the recovered land under San Francisco, the country goes down faster than the sea itself goes up.”
Govorcin and his colleagues used satellite radar to follow vertical land movement – or the upward and downward movement of the ground – along more than a thousand miles from the coast of California.
These shifting results of human activities such as groundwater pumps and waste water injection, as well as natural processes such as tectonic plate movement.
To measure the land sinking along the coast of California, the researchers analyzed radar data from Satellites of the European Space Agency (ESA), as well as movement speed data of land-based stations in the global navigation satellite system.
These observations were collected between 2015 and 2023, so that the team could see changes in land height over time and identify sinking hotspots that are most vulnerable to rising sea level.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, hotspots San Rafael, Corte Madera, Foster City and Bay Farm Island – where the country sinks more than 0.4 inches per year, largely due to sediment compaction.
Slowly moving landslides in the Big Sur-Bergen under San Francisco and the Palos Verdes peninsula in Los Angeles have also resulted in fast sinking.
The Palos Verdes peninsula is known for its landslides, but a separate NASA study published in September last year, it turned out that this community sinks to the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles at a stunning speed of four centimeters a week.
In San Rafael, only one foot sea level rise would flood entire neighborhoods, shopping centers and even some schools, according to the viewer of Noaa's sea level rise. The study predicts 17 centimeters of local sea level rise for this area in the next 25 years
The Pacific Pacific Pacific sinks at a speed of four centimeters a week
Several houses were destroyed in a landslide that ran through the Palos Verdes peninsula in July 2023.
This suburb of the coast is the home of around 11,000 people.
In North California, erosion has led to sinking hotspots at swamp and lagoons around San Francisco and Monterey Bay.
The sinking of the ground was the most extreme in the center of California, although this region is not on the coast and is therefore not that vulnerable to the rise in sea level.
In the central valley, the groundwater pumps ensure that the country sinks at a speed of eight centimeters a year.
By 2050, the sea level in California will be expected to rise between six and 14.5 inches above the year 2000, the researchers concluded.
Their findings are published in the magazine Science Advances.
State and federal water agencies have spent an estimated $ 100 million on repairing land-sinking-related damage in California since the 1960s, according to the Central Valley Flood Protection Board of the State.
And as the sea level continues to rise, the costs will do that.
