Climate change is going to change the shape of our world forever. The possibility that ancient ice sheets will melt and cause the sea levels to rise , to the fact we choke the atmosphere every year with greenhouse gases is just a few of the many factors. A new study claims that devastating 100-year floods could start happening yearly as soon as 2050.
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The new study suggests that carbon dioxide emissions could reach their peak by 2040. If that happens, the study claims that regions worldwide could begin to experience terrifying and destructive 100-year floors every nine to fifteen years on average. These types of floods are based on historical data and reportedly have a one percent chance of being exceeded in any given year.
Despite their long-winded name, 100-year floods can strike the same area multiple years in a row, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) says.
“The threshold that we expect to be exceeded once every hundred years on average is going to be exceeded much more frequently in a warmer climate until they are no longer considered 100-year events,” Hamed Moftakhari, a civil engineer and professor at the University of Alabama, explained.
Moftakhari is one of the authors of the new study, which is featured in Earth’s Future. The study discusses the possibility of rising sea levels, which could see coastal communities around the world experiencing deadly and devastating 100-year floods more often. Researchers say that extreme flooding can be caused also by the water being pushed into inland areas by storms.
Most notably, though, the study focuses on how these 100-year floods may be caused by the rising sea levels that we’ve seen over the past few decades. Floods can be devastating, no matter what the reason. We should avoid them as much as we possibly can.
The good news is that plenty of people are doing things to try to combat climate change and slow down the massive changes that our world is facing, so it isn’t quite a losing battle just yet.
The post New study claims we could see 100-year floods yearly by 2050 appeared first on BGR.
