Thames Flood Barrier

As a geologist, I know that no project is complete without a field trip, so I took myself off to the Thames Flood Barrier - London's very own adaptation to flooding and sea level change. In true field trip fashion, it rained, and was much colder than anticipated, but at least this time I didn't fall waist deep into a bog...


Much of London is built on the flood plain of the River Thames, and as such is at risk from flooding from high tides and storm surges from the North Sea. Storm surges occur when low pressure systems in the atmosphere above the Atlantic causes a relative rise in sea level, this can be particularly dangerous if the pressure system moves into the North Sea where it is relatively shallower (Environment Agency). Storm surges in conjunction with high tides can cause serious flooding in London.The Thames Flood Barrier was built in response to a disastrous flood in 1953 that killed over 2000 people in countries around the North Sea, including more than 300 people in the UK. East London was badly flooded, with over 3000 people were waiting overnight for rescue boats in Plaistow and West Ham (Thames Barrier Information Centre (TBIC)).


So the solution? Build one of the largest moveable flood barriers in the World, obviously!

Work started in 1971, with raising of the banks along the Thames, then in 1974 construction of the barrier began. Work was finished in 1982, and the barrier was first used in February 1983 (TBIC).

If it wasn't for the barrier, standing here in January 1993 would have been a very bad idea.

But as we know sea level is rising. Tides in the Thames estuary are rising by a rate of 60cm every 100 years. This is especially high because London is 'sinking' into the underlying clay, post-glacial isostatic adjustment is causing this part of the UK to subside, and because the weather is becoming stormier (TBIC). With a relatively higher sea level, storm surges and high tides don't need to be so big to cause as much damage, or even overcome the barrier.


The risk of London flooding is increasing with rising sea level. This is quite apparent when you look at this graph showing how many times the barrier has been shut to protect London since it was built. In April this year the barrier had already been closed a record 48 times!

 

Necessary closures of the barrier are highly variable, but the barrier is being closed more than was originally planned for when it was built (Environment Agency)

But what does this mean for the future?


The barrier was designed to cope with 100 years of rising sea level at a rate of 8 mm a year. But then a new flood management strategy will be needed. The Environment Agency has forecast that the current barrier will start to fail between 2030-2060 and has drawn up the Thames Estuary 2100 plan to discuss how we can minimise the effects of rising sea level. They suggest a combination of natural mitigation such as improved floodplain management and reintroducing intertidal habitats, and more man-made solutions such as building new bigger barriers further downstream.


Most importantly, they have recommended that flood defences are continually assessed and updated. I think this point is really crucial to coping with sea level rise all over the world. There is never going to be a final solution that we can put into place and forget about. Sea level is changing all the time and not always in predictable ways, warming climate will change the patterns of precipitation and storms and therefore the likelihood of flooding. So we really can't quantify the extent of flood defence measures that we will need in the future, and I think the most important thing is to be aware of that.

Melting Ice - Part 4 - Sea Ice

Gosh, there is just so much ice to talk about, but now for one with a bit of a difference. In addition to Greenland, the Arctic Circle is also home to the Arctic sea ice - a huge blanket of ice that forms over the North Pole. And this is serious ice - up to 5 metres at it's thickest points.

 

 Average Arctic sea ice extent for March and September over the period 1979-2000 (NSIDC). The grey circle in the middle is where there is no satellite coverage. I'm gonna hazard a guess and suggest that there might be ice there too.

 

Similar to ice everywhere, sea ice varies naturally throughout the year. The Arctic sea ice sheet undergoes ablation in the summer and then accumulation in the winter culminating in a peak ice extent in March. Then, unlike Antarctica, because the Arctic Sea is mostly enclosed by land, it is more difficult for the ice to move southwards and melt. Instead it's a bit like dodgems - the ice floats around bumping into other bits of ice and gradually getting thicker. In some parts it become so thick that it doesn't even melt during the summer (NSIDC). Exciting times - a permanent ice rink at the top of the world.

 

 

But summer Arctic sea ice extent and thickness has been in decline since the 1970s, the average rate of decline of sea ice extent since 1979 has  been -4.1% a decade (Xia et al 2014). The average age of the ice left at the pole is also decreasing (NASA).  An ice free North Pole during the summer is becoming an increasing possibility. There is some debate as to the cause of sea ice decline - it could be part of the natural variability  and changes in atmospheric circulation or anthropogenic or a combination (Vihma, 2014).

Decline of Arctic sea ice extent since 1979. 2007 and 2012 were particularly bad years - remember that the thickness of the ice is important too, the ice is thinning at the same time as the extent is shrinking (NSIDC).

Overland et al (2011) used a selection of coupled ocean-atmosphere models to estimate that there would be ice free summers at the pole by 2050. But is very difficult to model the rate that the Arctic is declining, some models produce earlier dates, while others are more conservative. In general, models tend to underestimate sea ice extent decline, and we have observed much faster rates of decline than expected (IPCC). We've even started to see the direct implications of melting sea ice, with shipping routes through the Arctic Circle becoming possible for longer during the summer (TheGuardian). But how is this decline in thousands and thousands of square kilometres of ice affecting sea level?

 

 

Well, in a change to seemingly all other forms of ice, not really!

 

 

Because sea is is already in the water, even if it melts it will have little effect on sea level (NSIDC). It will have a very small effect because the ice in the sea ice is fresher and therefore slightly less dense than the ocean water surrounding it, but it is essentially negligible. I have been unable to find an actual estimate for the amount that sea ice melting will contribute to sea level - do let me know if you find one.

 

 

But even if melting all the sea ice won't have much of a direct effect on sea level, it is important in other ways:

• Firstly, albedo, ice has a much higher albedo than ocean water. Melting the sea ice will decrease the planetary albedo, allowing the Earth to absorb more radiation, so more warming will occur. Pistone et al (2014) used satellites to measure the radiation budget of the Arctic, their measurements suggest a decrease in Arctic planetary albedo from 0.52 to 0.48 from 1979 to 2011. So ultimately sea ice melting will help to promote sea level rise through  thermal expansion, and melting of other ice sources.
• Secondly, because the sea ice is fresher than the oceans, when it melts it will, in effect, be diluting the oceans. A freshening of water, particularly in the north where much of the deep ocean water is formed, could have serious implications for the ocean circulation. But as I mentioned in the Greenland post, I'm saving the effects of ocean circulation on sea level for another time.
• Thirdly, loss of the sea ice could result in an increase of heat transfer between from the oceans to the atmosphere, at the moment the ice sort of acts as insulation. Without there will be more warming of the atmospshere and so more ice melt and thermal expansion (Vihma, 2014).

So, even if we start to see ice free summers at the North Pole in the near future, they will not have much of a direct impact on the global mean sea level. But, as Tesco says 'Every little Helps' so I think although the direct impact of sea ice melting on sea level may sound insignificant, the indirect effects of the melting sea ice are really really important. It's definitely not one to be ignored.

To finish with, here is a little video that NASA made showing the variability of Arctic sea ice this year:

Houses on Stilts

Apparently, ~21% of you don’t want to live in a floating house. Since there is no way of asking Canute how he feels about the issue, it is only fair to look into other accommodation possibilities for areas at risk of flooding.

Option 2: Houses on stilts

Already I’m imagining the house from Baba Yaga, and I’m not going to lie that story really scared me, but hopefully the real thing isn't so scary. Although actually a house which walks on chicken legs away from flooding might not actually be such a bad idea...

Just relocating to avoid that pesky thermal expansion again (Pixgood)

 

Houses on stilts are more common than you think - they have actually been built for thousands of years by communities all over the world, so they definitely work. They can be built over dry land or water - perhaps you are more ok with being surrounded by water if it is just  temporary? And there are loads of advantages:

• The obvious one is flood protection, houses can be built high enough to accommodate for high tides and storm surges - now you just need to make sure you didn't park the car under the house!
• Nice bit of shade under the houses.
• Unlike the floating houses I looked at last month, houses on stilts are always level so it doesn't matter where you put your furniture, and they can't sink.
• They can be built in areas where it is otherwise not possible to live such as bogs, and lakes.
• It's even possible to transform a normal house into a house on stilts (DailyMail).
• Doesn't really seem to be any limitations in design- in Galvaston, Texas, they are basically building mansions, such as this one here:





Perhaps showing your stilts is a bit like showing your ankles in Victorian England? This house has disguised it's stilts with 'walls' (CoastalLiving).

 

Personally, I think houses on stilts sounds like a great idea, I like that they are still very recognisable as houses, and that sometimes it might be possible to go fishing on your doorstep (although if this is what you want from life I think that floating houses are really more up your street!).

 

 

I can see one obvious disadvantage to these houses - they are not adjustable. If sea level rises more than expected or if there was a particularly high tide combined with a particularly strong storm surge, your house might not be dry anymore. As sea level rises you may no longer be based over dry land. You could end up with a very wet garden, admittedly Ariel had an amazing underwater garden, but there may come a point when seaweed and fish just isn't the same at petunias and sparrows.
 

 

So what do you think?

Would you live in a house on stilts?

 

I'd be interested to know your reasons, so if you've got time do comment and let me know why you chose what you chose.

If it's a yes - you can get onto choosing your house here, if it's a no, don't worry,  I'm sure I can come up with another possibility over the next few weeks.

 

Melting Ice - Part 3 - A reason why it is called Greenland?

I always found it confusing as a child that Greenland was called green. I had a big jigsaw with lots of animals on it and crucially lots of snow too. While my jigsaw wasn't entirely accurate - ice sheets don't cover the whole of Greenland, it did give me the impression that there was some ice. But for how much longer?

A little far from home? Possibly the iceberg that sank the Titanic (Wired)

As King of Denmark, Greenland is pretty much Canute's own country - so no doubt it's doing something to the sea level. Greenland is covered in glaciers and ice sheets which fluctuate in size naturally throughout the year. But satellite measurements since the 1990s show that the Greenland ice mass is decreasing - Greenland is losing more ice than it is accumulating (Sasgen et al, 2012). Research by Bates et al (2009) shows that since 1990, as the oceans and the atmosphere around Greenland warm up, the ice on Greenland is moving at increasing rates into the sea. Rather excitingly the iceberg that sank the Titanic originally came fro Greenland. Rignot et al (2005) found that while the ice sheet appears to be stable in the centre, increased run off and glacier flow into the ocean, at the edges of the ice sheet are causing the ice sheet to decrease in mass.  It's exactly the same problem as with the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, and marine terminating glaciers all over the world - they are being warmed and melted by the relatively warm ocean water - still not warm enough for swimming though!

The NSIDC have produced this graph which shows really clearly that the extent of melting in Greenland this year is generally higher than the 1981 -2010 average. Check out their website for daily satellite images of the Greenland ice melt.

So how is the decreasing Greenland ice sheet affecting sea level? Well, to put it simply, quite a lot. The IPCC released some rather stark figures in their Assessment Report 5:

"Observations indicate that the Greenland contribution to GMSL has very likely increased from 0.09 [–0.02 to 0.20] mm/yr for 1992 - 2001 to 0.59 [0.43 to 0.76] mm/yr for 2002 - 2011."

 

So that's a huge increase in Greenland's contribution to sea level rise over the last twenty years. So what's going to happen in the future?


It has been estimated that the whole of Greenland melting could cause a ~7 metre sea level rise, but it's quite difficult to work out how quickly this could happen. Rignot et al (2005) point out that glacier dynamics are not usually included in the models used to estimate Greenland contribution. The exclusion of these important physical processes will result in an underestimation of how the melting of Greenland's ice sheets and glaciers could affect sea level in the future. Despite these modelling difficulties, Graversen et al(2011) suggest that melting on Greenland could cause global mean sea level to rise by up to 17cm by the end of this century. Price et al (2011) modelled the ice sheet dynamics for the three biggest Greenland glaciers, they then scaled this up for the whole of Greenland and forecast a 45mm sea level contribution by 2100 from dynamics alone.

So Greenland is definitely one to watch for the future, but Greenland melting could have further implications on sea level than just adding water, and icebergs, to the oceans. As the ice sheet and glaciers melt they are adding fresh water to the oceans which can impact on ocean circulation, which in turn can affect regional sea level. But I'll save that for another time.

 

Bad news for Astronauts?

I wasn't going to post today, but then I just read that sea level rise is affecting NASA, and those 'Write a Blog bells' started going off in my head.
 

The Climate Adaptations Science Investigators (CASI) was set up with the aim of helping NASA to cope with climate change. Many of NASA's launch facilities are positioned near the coast, in areas undergoing significant sea level rise. The increasing effects of sea level and storm surges are putting important infrastructure at risk, and may make it more difficult to get into space!

Sea level rise observed near five space centres (Rosenzweig et al, 2014)



A new report looks at how 'climate resilience' can be improved at NASA, and they've got lots of ideas (Rosenzweig et al, 2014).

Before and after shot of  the new beach
at the Wallop Flight Facility (NASA)

• At the Kennedy Space Centre there are plans to build a second dune system inland which will be coupled with a beach and dune nourishment programme to protect the launch sites.
• The Goddard Space Flight Centre has already started replacing lawn with more natural vegetation with the aim of reducing the amount of run off into storm drains, and therefore flooding, and pollution in Chesapeake Bay. They are also building rain gardens to capture water from large concreted areas such as car parks.
• At the Wallop Flight Facility on the Atlantic Coast they are so concerned  that they have released their own document called 'Adapting Now to a Changing Climate'. They have already extended the beach in front of the launch pad, using sand dredged from offshore, in order to try and protect the launch area from the sea.

As it's NASA, I imagine they have more money at their disposal than Tuvalu which I wrote about last week, but I find it really interesting that they are both essentially planning the same thing - a man-made version of a natural barrier. In Tuvalu they are planning concrete reefs to change currents, and NASA are planning to build a dune. Seems like nature may have the answer - for now.
 



Melting Ice - Part 2 - Antarctica

And now for part 2 of my melting ice mini-series – Antarctica. This is a tricky one because although the Antarctic ice-sheets have been losing mass, on average Antarctic sea ice is increasing by ~1.5% a decade (IPCC). So what’s going on? And how is that rather large accumulation of ice on the other side of the world affecting sea level?

 

Antarctica: Making Australia look small since 35 Ma
(planetobserver)

So first, a little information about Antarctica, I am continually amazed by how big Antarctica actually is, I just don’t think pictures and maps get it across. Antarctica is bigger than the USA, and much of the continent is technically a desert (albeit rather colder than what initially comes to my mind when I think of deserts), with ice sheets up to 5km deep compressing the bedrock below. These ice sheets are made up of ~90% of the World's freshwater, and if they melted completely this would cause a ~70 metre rise in sea level (BAS). So clearly any changes in Antarctic ice mass are really, really important in terms of sea level.

 

 

Antarctica is divided by the Transantarctic Mountains which separate the East Antarctic Ice Sheet from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice sheets are reacting differently to climate change and will therefore affect sea level in different ways.

 

 

The Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the more stable of the two because it rests on bedrock which is above sea level. While some parts of the ice sheet are showing decrease in ice mass, there are signs that Dronning Maud Laud and Wilkes Land are actually gaining mass as a result of increased snowfall. This doesn't necessarily mean it's getting colder though, more snow could actually be a result of atmospheric warming. The EAIS is currently growing at a rate of 25 Gt y^-1 (Shepherd and Wingham, 2007).

 

Meanwhile on the other side, the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is resting on bedrock below sea level (NASA have compared West Antarctica to Hawaii because it is made up of lots of little islands!). Much of the base of this ice sheet is in contact with sea water - in some places the ice sheet base is up to 1700 metres below sea level. This is important because while the water is very cold there, it is still water. In this area the ocean is ~0.5°C  above freezing (Shepherd et al, 2004), this is significantly warmer than the ice sheets themselves. So in effect the very very cold sea water is warming the base of the glacier causing thinning of the ice sheet and ice to discharged into the oceans (Payne et al, 2004). The WAIS is currently shrinking at a rate of 50 Gt yr^-1 which easily cancels out any growing done by the EAIS (Shepherd and Wingman, 2007).
 

 

Rignot et al (2011) measured acceleration of ice sheet depletion between 1992 and 2009. They found acceleration in Antarctic ice depletion to be 21.9 Gt/yr² over this period, almost double that of mountain glaciers and ice caps. They suggest that if this trend continues the combined effect of melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica will become the main contributor towards rising sea level this century.

Ice Mass Change 2002-2009 (NASA)

 

So the ice sheets of Antarctica area changing a lot, and the huge volume of ice locked up at the South Pole has the capacity to have a huge effect on sea level around the world. Even though some parts of the Antarctic are accumulating ice, overall changes in ice at the South Pole are contributing towards sea level rise, and will become more important in the future. Both poles are being affected by climate change, and will undergo big changes in the future. I'm going to look into how changes in ice volume at the North Pole will affect sea level in the next episode of my melting ice mini- series (like all good series I'm finishing with a taster of what's to come), but if you are interested in how the other ways the Poles are being affected by climate change do check out Fiona's blog.

 

 

Drowning Islands

In this post I’m going to address all those wannabe Atlantises out there – the Drowning Islands. These are the very low altitude islands for whose residents moving to higher land is just not an option. The islands' very existence is threatened by rising sea level. As Hugh Grant said in About a Boy ‘No man is an island’, and in this instance, that is probably a good thing.

A cabinet meeting held underwater in the Maldives to raise awareness about rising sea levels (TheTelegraph).

There are many islands in our tropical oceans that may have to contemplate extinction in the future, but the tiny nation of Tuvalu is perhaps one of the saddest examples. By building airport runways with surrounding coral, we have damaged the reefs and aquifers. Construction of piers changed the wave pattern so that less sand is deposited on the beaches. Seawater is bubbling up through the aquifers onto the island, the islands are gradually eroding, and on top of this sea level has risen on average 2mm yr^-1 over the period 1950 - 2001 (Church et al, 2006). The problem is exacerbated by increasing frequency of storm surges (Mimura, 1999), and the effects of phenomena such as ENSO, and the Asian-Australian Monsoon.

In 2003, the Tuvaluan Prime Minister compared the sea level rise they are experiencing to 'a slow and insidious form of terroism', and earlier this year the present PM compared it to a 'weapon of mass destruction'  So what are the Tuvaluan people doing to save their home? Is there any way to adapt?


Mimura (1999) looked into the vulnerability of islands such as Tuvalu, in the the South Pacific. He pointed out the importance of natural barriers such as reef systems, mangroves and sandy beaches for protecting islands from rising sea level. Natural barriers are important because they can reduce erosion along the coast and absorb some of the wave energy before it reaches the settlements. But sea level is increasing too fast for coral to keep up and increasing ocean temperatures have led to coral bleaching destroying the natural defence they provide . Tuvaluans have tried planting trees along the coast lines to create natural barriers, but their efficacy has yet to be proved (NAPA).


Several other more man-made solutions have also been tried, such as building sea walls and Tuvalu's National Adaptation Programme of Action have suggested creating concrete current breakers between the atolls to decrease current speed and reduce erosion on the islands. The islands are also trying to grow crops that are happy in saline conditions, and are collecting and storing more rainwater now that groundwater is no longer drinkable.


These are clearly only temporary measures, Tuvalu is poor - much of the national income is from renting out the internet domain .tv to television companies, and even rich countries can't hold back the sea forever. Sea level is forecast to rise during this century, and with an average elevation of just 1.8 metres, Tuvalu may have to look into evacuating it's population. Even without the effects of anthropogenic sea level rise, there is nothing to say that these islands would be safe from sea level rise. However it does seem unfair that it is often the poorest communities, with little contribution to global GHG emissions will be the first to suffer from sea level change.

One day it might be necessary for Tuvaluans to leave their home (Coolheadsforahotplanet)