500 Year Floods Now Coming to New York Every 24 Years

Grab your bang , New Yorkers : The inundation of Hurricane Sandy might have been billed as a 3,000 year flood , but according to new inquiry , the return interval for Sandy - sized flood events has shrunk . By a factor of 23 .

We already knew that New York City was on the front note of sea level rise , butresearchpublished this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science finds that the Big Apple has also become a lot more susceptible to inundation from massive storms . Historic record of flooding in New York only date back to the mid-19th century , but by examining the distribution of microfossils called order Foraminifera in nearby salt marshes , researchers were able-bodied to reconstruct the history of tropical cyclone and flood tide events all the way back to 850 AD .

Their finding ? mod times are mother eldritch . Focusing on the region in Lower Manhattan bonk as the Battery , the researchers incur that while a Sandy - sized storm — which produced 9.2 animal foot ( 2.81 meters ) of upsurge — used to be a 3,000 yr event , a torrent of its order of magnitude could now fall out every 130 years . 500 year floods , which cause 7.4 ft ( 2.25 m ) of storm surge , are now betoken to thwack Manhattan ever 24 years . New Yorkers can thank a compounding of sea level rise and more extreme storm events for their inundation - filled future .

Starship Test 9

What ’s the city to do about this sorry forecast ? First off , New York call for to start endue instorm - proof infrastructure , whether that means higher groyne , sturdier building groundwork or newfangled outflow for soggy streets . secondly , its 8 million - ish elector could , you know , start using their political weight to help elect candidate who in reality want to harness climate change — which is , of course , the undisputed source of the problem .

Do n’t like either of those option ? Buy a kayak .

[ take thefull scientific paperat PNAS h / tNew Scientist ]

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