Water, water, everywhere

In just the last couple weeks I've seen a couple sites exploring what will happen when sea levels rise due to climate change.

Nickolay Lamm and Remik Ziemlinski created maps showing what would be underwater when sea levels rose by 5 feet (maybe a hundred years from now), 12 feet (perhaps by 2300), and 25 feet (centuries from now). Lamm found photos of areas around New York City, Boston, Washington, and Miami. He then manipulated the images according to the maps to show what those scenes would be like with each amount of water. Miami is done for. Boston and Cambridge are going to be quite wet. The National Mall will be inundated, making the White House beachfront property. A good deal of Manhattan will stay above the waves, though a lot of New Jersey will be under a much wider Hudson River.

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the fed agency that includes the National Weather Service, among other things), in partnership with several other organizations has created a Sea Level Rise Viewer. This is a program that shows what parts of the coasts become inundated as sea levels rise. This seems more realistic and official -- there is a disclaimer that you shouldn't depend on it to accurately predict what will happen in a particular spot. Don't make real estate decisions on just this data. The program shows NYC to Virginia, Georgia to Mississippi, Texas (meaning it skips Louisiana), and California to Washington (not much happens to Seattle because it is so hilly). In a few places it will show a photo of a landmark and what rising sea level might do to it. This one is a lot less dramatic because it only explores a rise of six feet.