When we think of sea level rise, we probably have a fairly simple explanation for what happens. The glaciers and polar icecaps melt, the resulting water flows into the world’s oceans and they rise accordingly. But, in actuality, the process is far more complicated than that. Consider Antarctica as an example—usually neglected because of its remoteness and the incorrect assumption until recently about its relative stability.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Sea Level RiseTag Archives: Sea level rising
Quadra Project: The Panama Canal
The Panama Canal and the Suez Canal are both magnificent feats of engineering that allow marine shipping to move east and west across the mid-latitudes without having to make the long journey around the continents of South America and Africa, respectively. The Suez is mostly a big ditch that was dredged in the sand to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. No locks are required because the two seas are at the same elevation. Building the Panama Canal, however, was a much more complicated engineering problem, solved with remarkable ingenuity.
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The Quadra Project: Welcome to 2024
Unless you’re brave enough to consider the reality of our global environmental situation, don’t read this. Confronting it is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic, but of being realistic—of assessing what we’re doing on our planet, what we want to avoid, what we want to accomplish, and what we can do both collectively and individually to have a more promising future. In one more year we will have reached a quarter of the way to 2100, and we are well on our way to creating conditions that we will either applaud or bemoan.
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Saving the Cowichan Estuary from drowning in a climate-fed ‘coastal squeeze’
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
High atop a dike hemming the Koksilah River as its fresh waters meet salt, red-winged blackbirds call out as they patrol their territory.
Noisy heralds of spring, the blackbirds return to the Cowichan Estuary each year to nest and protest human intrusion with sharp signature trills from the brush along the riverbank.
Today the interloper is Tom Reid, conservation land management program manager with the Nature Trust of British Columbia (NTBC), who stands atop the 15-foot-high rock embankment he is working to destroy.
The dike, built to fortify farmland stolen from the estuary, is stifling the tidal marsh vital to the survival of a host of endangered salmon and bird species that rely on it for breeding, feeding and migration, he said.
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Unchecked climate change puts Canada’s West Coast in hot water
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Last year was the hottest on record for the ocean, an upward trend only expected to continue as it wreaks havoc on coastal communities and spurs irreversible losses to marine ecosystems.
Ocean warming has cascading effects, melting polar ice and causing sea-level rise, marine heat waves and ocean acidification, the United Nations’ panel of climate experts made clear on Monday.
Sea-level rise has doubled in the last three decades, reaching a record high in 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported. Rising seas, coupled with more extreme weather, are setting the stage for a perfect storm of flooding for coastal communities.
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