By Eric Zerkel The Weather Channel
Whether you’re rollerblading along Venice Beach, downing a prawn or 12 at San Francisco’s Pier 33, or shagging foul balls at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, the West Coast of the United States offers up thousands of miles of coastline and hundreds of iconic locales to match. More importantly, 39 percent of America’s population, some 123 million people, call America’s coastline home, a number that’s expected to rise 20 million by 2020, according to NOAA.
But the West Coast we all know and love may be under as much as 25 feet of water in the years to come. National Geographic reports that Global Mean Sea Levels have risen 4 to 8 inches over the past century, and more alarmingly, the rate at which the sea-level rises has doubled over the past 20 years.
And while you may not catch a glimpse of an inundated Venice Beach in your lifetime, the generations that follow very well could.
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Artist Nickolay Lamm gives us a glimpse into that grim future with a series of illustrations showing what famous sea-side locales would look like under forecasted sea-level changes. Lamm’s West Coast series builds upon his previous work, which visualized iconic East Coast sites like the Jefferson Memorial flooded by seas. Using stock photos and data from Climate Central, Lamm mashes together illustrations that show the photographer’s prospective in 100 to 300 years (5 feet), the year 2300 (12 feet), and the centuries to come (25 feet). The end result is an eerie glimpse into a future drastically altered by climate change.
Check out Lamm’s illustrations in the slideshow here.
This article was written by Eric Zerkel and published at The Weather Channel on July 15, 2013
