New Jersey shore likely faces unprecedented flooding by mid-century

Rutgers Today: Geoscientists at Rutgers and Tufts universities estimate that the New Jersey shore will likely experience a sea-level rise of about 1.5 feet by 2050 and of about 3.5 feet by 2100 – 11 to 15 inches higher than the average for sea-level rise globally over the century.

That would mean, the scientists say, that by the middle of the century, the one-in-10 year flood level at Atlantic City would exceed any flood known there from the observational record, including Superstorm Sandy.

Ken Miller, Robert Kopp, Benjamin Horton and James Browning of Rutgers and Andrew Kemp of Tufts base their projections in part upon an analysis of  historic and modern-day records of sea-level rise in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Their research appears in the inaugural issue of the journal Earth’s Future, published this week by the American Geophysical Union. It builds upon a recent study by Kemp, Horton and others that reconstructed a 2,500-year record of sea level at the New Jersey shore.  Horton is a professor of marine and coastal sciences in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; Kemp, an assistant professor of earth and ocean sciences at Tufts.

“It’s clear from both the tide gauge and geological records that sea level has been rising in the mid-Atlantic region at a foot per century as a result of global average sea-level rise and the solid earth’s ongoing adjustment to the end of the last ice age,” said Miller, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences. “In the sands of the New Jersey coastal plain, sea level is also rising by another four inches per century because of sediment compaction – due partly to natural forces and partly to groundwater withdrawal. But the rate of sea-level rise, globally and regionally, is increasing due to melting of ice sheets and the warming of the oceans.”....

A 1930 postcard of a concrete ship foundering off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey