Artículo Want to know if your city will flood when the ice caps melt? Use this forecasting tool Do

Want to know if your city will flood when the ice caps melt? Use this forecasting tool

Scientists have developed a way of determining what problems you might face in the future

16 Noviembre 2017 15:35

In a rapidly warming climate, where ice caps are melting at a rate not previously seen at any other point in recorded history, it’s not alarmist to prepare for the worst. The worst being your city or place of residence being flooded by rising sea levels.

A Nasa forecasting tool now lets you check how you or loved ones might be affected by flooding in the future. It looks at the Earth's spin and gravitational effects to predict how water will be ‘redistributed’ globally.

‘This provides, for each city, a picture of which glaciers, ice sheets, [and] ice caps are of specific importance,’ say the researchers. The tool was developed by scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Senior scientist Dr Erik Ivins said: ‘As cities and countries attempt to build plans to mitigate flooding, they have to be thinking about 100 years in the future and they want to assess risk in the same way that insurance companies do.’

Early predictions suggest London's sea-levels could rise significantly because it may be affected by changes in the north-western part of the Greenland ice sheet. And in New York the area of concern is the ice sheet's entire northern and eastern portions.

Dr Surendra Adhikar, another scientist working on the tool, added: ‘People can be desperate to understand how these huge, complicated global processes impact on them. With this tool, they can see the impact on their own city.’

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