Billy Fleming (editor) - A blueprint for coastal adaptation : uniting design, economics, and policy

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2021 Carolyn Kousky, William Fleming, and Alan M. Berger

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Keywords: abandoned property, adaptation, community engagement, climate change, disaster financing, drinking water, dynamic shoreline, environmental impact bonds, equity, flood insurance, floodplain, flood risk reduction, insurance, land use, National Flood Insurance Program, natural hazards, mitigation strategies, public funding, Rebuild by Design, resilience, salt line, sea level rise, urban planning, water management, wetland protection, zoning

Jeff Goodell

I N LATE FEBRUARY 2019, I was part of a team of fifty scientists and crew members who sailed out of Punta Arenas, Chile, aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long icebreaker and scientific research vessel, bound for West Antarctica. We cruised through the Strait of Magellan, rolled for three days across the notoriously rough Drake Passage, and broke through many miles of sea ice. Then early on a Tuesday morning, on a remote section of the coast of the icy continent where few humans beings have ever ventured, the Doomsday Glacier loomed up out of the fog and revealed itself to us.

Peter Sheehan, twenty-seven-year-old researcher from the United Kingdoms University of East Anglia, was the first scientist aboard the Palmer to lay eyes on the enormous glacier. At around six oclock that morning, he climbed up five flights of stairs from the lab to the ships bridge, where he took sea ice assessments every hour throughout the night. And there it was: a big wall of ice on the starboard side of the ship, looming in the early morning light.

It was an eerie sightthe blue water, the blue sky, the blue ice, Sheehan told me later. It was all shades of blue.

Sheehan, who had never been to Antarctica before, was dumbstruck by the beauty of it all. He ran down to get his camera and then put on his coat and walked out to the bow of the ship, where he stood alone, one of the first human beings ever to confront this enormous glacier whose fate is inextricably linked with the future of coastal cities around the world. The scientifically correct name for the glacier is Thwaites, but at that moment, its informal nicknamethe Doomsday Glacierseemed much more fitting.

Usually I have a science mind, I am considering how were going to collect data, but at that moment, it was all the human reaction. I was just overwhelmed by the power and beauty of it.

Thwaites Glacier is one of the most important tipping points in Earths climate system. One way to think of Thwaites, which is about the size of the state of Florida, is as the cork in the wine bottle for the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If it collapses, it could eventually dump enough ice into the ocean to cause seas to rise by ten feet or more. That would doom Miami, Boston, New York City, London, Shanghai, Jakarta, and virtually every other coastal city in the world. As Thwaites goes, so go coastal cities as we know them.

If that sounds melodramatic, well, we live in melodramatic times. As I wrote in The Water Will Come, my recent book about the causes and consequences of sea level rise: The simple truth is the climate is warming, the worlds great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.

By 8:00 a.m., virtually the entire science and support team on the Palmermaybe twenty-five peoplecrowded up onto the bridge, which is like a skybox five levels above the main deck, with big windows and a bridgewalk that lets you stroll around outside. We all had our cameras and iPhones out, snapping pictures as we cruised along the hundred-foot-tall craggy face of Thwaitess ice shelf. The weather was oddly warm and welcomingthe wind calm, the sea tranquil. The Palmer was able to get within a few hundred feet of the calving frontan extremely rare thing to be able to do at any glacier, much less a giant like Thwaites, due to the risk of falling ice.

I talked with Rob Larter, the chief scientist on the trip. Its more chaotic than I expected, he said when I asked him about his first impressions of the glacier. He explained that most ice shelves in Antarctica are flatthey are like slices of wedding cake. In contrast, many sections of the Thwaites ice shelf were a jumbled mess, with big crevasses and sloping shoulders. To Larter, the sloping shoulders of the ice shelf meant there was a lot of melting going on at the base of the ice sheet, which meant there was probably a lot of warm Circumpolar Deep Water flowing in below. Later, research done aboard the