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An oscillation of the Moon’s orbit, combined with climate change, is likely to cause massive flooding, a new study has warned, with the potential for coastal cities to find themselves regularly submerged from the mid-1930s. Recently published research highlights just how dangerous uncontrolled global warming can be and how it can leave dangerous, even natural, environmental cycles.
The oscillation of the Moon, for example, is nothing new. Scientists have been aware of the change of orbit for hundreds of years, with a cadence of 18.6 years in the way the Moon passes around the Earth.
During half of this cycle, the Moon’s gravitational pull is removed. As a result, high tides on Earth are lower, while low tides are higher. However for the other half of the cycle, the gravitational attraction is amplified; which leaves high tides higher and low tides lower.
Flooding at high tide is already a challenge for some coastal towns. According to NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that there were more than 600 such floods in 2019, where the lunar cycle triggers spontaneous flooding in low areas.
The problem is, a new study published in Nature Climate Change explains, that when the amplified half of the lunar cycle is combined with the rise in sea level due to global warming, it leads to even higher tides. By the 2030s, when the next amplified cycle arrives, global sea level is expected to have risen to such an extent that flooding will be much more widespread.
“Global sea level rise will have been at work for another decade,” says NASA. “The high seas, amplified by the lunar cycle, will cause an increase in the number of floods on almost all of the mainland coasts of the United States, Hawaii and Guam. Only the coasts of the far north, including that of Alaska, will be spared for a decade or more, as these land areas increase due to long-term geological processes. ”
To determine the exact impact, the researchers built a new model that compared NOAA’s sea level rise scenarios with flood thresholds, historical flood patterns, astronomical cycles and other events impacting the tides such as El Niño. This gave them a framework that could project results into 2080, in fact, although the bad news comes much sooner than that.
“The mid-1930s, in particular, could see the start of rapid increases in the frequency of [high-tide flooding] in several coastal regions of the United States, ”the study warns.
NASA already offers a sea level portal, which shows predictions of where rising sea levels are most likely to be felt. Now, the agency plans to add data from this new model to better shape this analysis.
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