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east coast

A map of the United States post land-ice melt.

Land ice: We got a lot of it. Considering the two largest ice sheets on earth — the one on Antarctica and the one on Greenland — extend more than 6 million square miles combined ... yeah, we're talkin' a lot of ice. But what if it was all just ... gone? Not like gone gone, but melted?

If all of earth's land ice melted, it would be nothing short of disastrous. And that's putting it lightly. This video by Business Insider Science (seen below) depicts exactly what our coastlines would look like if all the land ice melted. And spoiler alert: It isn't great. Lots of European cities like, Brussels and Venice, would be basically underwater.

I bring up the topic not just for funsies, of course, but because the maps are real possibilities.

How? Climate change.

As we continue to burn fossil fuels for energy and emit carbon into our atmosphere, the planet gets warmer and warmer. And that, ladies and gentlemen, means melted ice.

A study published this past September by researchers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany found that if we don't change our ways, there's definitely enough fossil fuel resources available for us to completely melt the Antarctic ice sheet.

Basically, the self-inflicted disaster you see above is certainly within the realm of possibility.


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In Africa and the Middle East? Dakar, Accra, Jeddah — gone.



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Millions of people in Asia, in cities like Mumbai, Beijing, and Tokyo, would be uprooted and have to move inland.



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South America would say goodbye to cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.


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And in the U.S., we'd watch places like Houston, San Francisco, and New York City — not to mention the entire state of Florida — slowly disappear into the sea.


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All GIFs via Business Insider Science/YouTube.

Business Insider based these visuals off National Geographic's estimation that sea levels will rise 216 feet (!) if all of earth's land ice melted into our oceans.

There's even a tool where you can take a detailed look at how your community could be affected by rising seas, for better or worse.

Although ... looking at these maps, it's hard to imagine "for better" is a likely outcome for many of us.

Much of America's most populated regions would be severely affected by rising sea levels, as you'll notice exploring the map, created by Alex Tingle using data provided by NASA.

Take, for instance, the West Coast. (Goodbye, San Fran!)



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Or the East Coast. (See ya, Philly!)


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And the Gulf Coast. (RIP, Bourbon Street!)

"This would not happen overnight, but the mind-boggling point is that our actions today are changing the face of planet Earth as we know it and will continue to do so for tens of thousands of years to come," said lead author of the study Ricarda Winkelmann, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

If we want to stop this from happening," she says, "we need to keep coal, gas, and oil in the ground."

The good news? Most of our coastlines are still intact! And they can stay that way, too — if we act now.

World leaders are finallystarting to treat climate change like the global crisis that it is — and you can help get the point across to them, too.

Check out Business Insider's video below:


- YouTubewww.youtube.com


This article originally appeared eleven years ago.

If you drive a car, you may want to fill up your tank sooner rather than later.

A major pipeline that serves 13 states on the East Coast has been closed after a massive spill was discovered on Sept. 9, 2016.

Repair efforts were delayed by bad weather, and experts are now saying that the pipeline has been closed long enough that it will start punching consumers right in the wallet.


Photo by Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images.

“We’re starting to see the dominoes fall where this will become an issue that will affect motorists’ wallets for sure,” said Patrick DeHaan a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy. “It could become not only a wallet issue but a fuel availability issue.”

The Colonial Pipeline delivers about 40% of the gas used on the East Coast of the United States.

Many states have already taken steps to prevent a chaotic gas shortage freakout.

Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama have waived rules that limit how many hours truck drivers can travel so they can speed up fuel deliveries.

On Sept. 14, hoping not to disrupt fuel transport, the EPA ended a Clean Air Act summer requirement for cleaner gas two days early for 13 counties in Georgia and five counties in Tennessee.

Photo by Phillippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images.

And Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley declared a state of emergency in Shelby County after the gas spill.

So yeah. Things aren't looking great. But don't get too worried.

For the most part, gas consumers on the East Coast will see a price spike and not much else. Repair efforts are underway at the pipeline and (hopefully) everything will be back up and running normally before long.

The truly fascinating thing about this story is that it highlights just how powerful fossil fuels are in our economy.

Even if you set aside their harmful environmental effects (which you shouldn't), watching our economy bend and shape itself with every change in gas availability is alarming.

This outage has already driven gas futures up 5%, which is only the third time this summer that they've gone up that much.

And honestly, I have no idea what gas futures are, but the effect of gasoline on the economy is pretty stunning.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

As the prices rise and fall, there's a huge impact on the wallets of everyday people — and when that price can be affected so greatly by something like an accidental spill, it puts our economy and livelihoods in a weirdly fragile place. It gets weirder when you remember that the majority of the gas we use comes from overseas.

Loosening our dependence on fossil fuels could help ease crises like this in the future. Imagine if more drivers on the East Coast had electric cars. *Thinking face emoji*

For now, East Coasters will just have to wait it out.

The pipe will be fixed, the spill will get cleaned up, and eventually everything will return to normal.

The real question is: How much longer will we let fossil fuels push us around?

Good news: The chances of your home becoming beachfront property in the next 80 years may have just gone up 200%! That's also the bad news.

A renowned team of climatologists just published a new study about sea level rise in the science journal Nature. By factoring in the frightening increase in the rate of melting ice from Antarctica and Greenland, they calculated a global sea level rise of more than six feet by the end of the century — more than twice as much as previously predicted.


'Cause that's not concerning. Nope, not at all. Photo by Philippe Huguen/Getty Images.

Basically, that awful thing that we already knew was coming? It's probably going to be even worse than we thought.

We're already feeling the undeniable effects of climate change. At this point, it's still mild enough for most of us (in the U.S., anyway) that we're willing to chalk it up to random weird weather flukes, rather than the warning signs of an impending disaster.

And based on earlier climate models, it looked like we were still two generations away from the "real damage." But according to this latest study, children who are living today will live to see some pretty catastrophic changes.

Not to get all "think of the children!" but, well, think of the children!

Oh! Look! A father and son having fun in the water! ... Because rising sea levels destroyed their home! Hooray! Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

If you're a climate scientist — or a writer who pays attention to these things — you're probably freaking out right now.

But if you're having trouble trying to fathom what six feet of sea level rise actually means for your life, or the lives of your children and grandchildren,please allow me demonstrate what six feet of water by the year 2100 means for some major American regions.

In Seattle, for example, it won't just be the rain that makes it wet...

All GIFs via National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And the Bay Area will be a lot more "Bay" than "Area."

"Los Angeles 2100" both sounds and looks like a big budget disaster movie.

On the plus side, coastal Texas will be too busy fighting floods to worry about oil spills in the Gulf.

And if you thought the hurricanes and floods that have been ravaging southern Louisiana were bad before, just wait.

Do you think the phrase "climate change" will still be banned when Miami looks like this?

Of course, the coast of North Carolina won't look so pretty either.

As for the New York metro area? It'll be less "Empire State of Mind" and more "Waterworld."

Boston's going back to the bay, and taking MIT and Harvard with it.

As for those of you who live inland? Your hometown might not look so bad in 80 years. But that doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory either.

Think about what happens to our national economy when all of the coastal land has been destroyed and people start to flock en masse to landlocked states. After all, that's basically what happened in Syria.

So while you lovely Nebraskans might be safe from flooding for the time being, it won't protect you from rising temperatures, agricultural bedlam, ravenous mosquito hordes, vicious winds, or the general calamity caused by mass migration.

As for why the prediction changed, the simple truth is there are a lot of factors involved in ecological disaster — all of which work together like a "Mad Max"-style domino chain.

Even if some of these climate models have changed over time — and if the predictions haven't been 100% accurate — it's not because climate change isn't real. It's because it's hard to figure out every detail of how it'll affect the world.

But hopefully, the thought that our children — not some distant future generation, but our actual children — are almost certainly going to suffer from our environmental hubris will be enough to motivate more people into taking action to cut our carbon emissions and stop this post-apocalyptic future before it happens.

Which, again, is much sooner than you think.

Trees: Green, leafy, rustling in the wind. Old-fashioned, carve your name into 'em, crash your bike into 'em trees.

Trees! Photo by Chelsea Bock/Unsplash.


America has more of them now than it's had in 100 years.

Yes! Really. This is very good news. Thanks in large part to sustainable harvesting practices and the creation of national parks, forest growth has been exceeding deforestation in the U.S. for decades.

In fact, many American forestry companies are planting more trees than they harvest. Which is pretty cool if you enjoy looking at trees or, you know ... BREATHING AIR.

The United States contains 8% of the world's forests.

That's roughly 300 million hectares of forest, which is exceeded only by Russia, Brazil, and Canada (where presumably the trees get free health care).

Right before you decorate it and watch it die. Photo by Andrew Spencer/Unsplash.

The largest area of forest growth continues to be on the East Coast.

Average wood-per-acre volumes there have nearly doubled since the 1950s. Which is amazing progress, since the East Coast was the area most heavily logged by European settlers in the 1600s.

"You ever just wonder what it's all really about, man?" Photo by Ales Krevec/Unsplash.

Even New York City, a place not exactly known for its abundance of trees, is doing its part.

In April 2007, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans to plant 1 million trees in New York City by 2017. That ambitious goal was met this November with two years to spare — a once-in-a-lifetime case of government accomplishing something faster than expected.

And as if there could be more good news...

It's not just America. The world has more trees than anyone previously thought.

A lot more.

A study conducted by 38 scientists and published by the journal Nature found that there are over 3 trillion trees on the planet, several times higher than previous estimates.

There are 3 tillion trees on Earth. Pictured are some of them. Photo by Kaleb Nimz/Unsplash.

While all of these numbers are encouraging, the picture isn't entirely rosy.

The world still has fewer trees than at any point in human history. Which isn't great.

According to Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the spread of human influence has reduced the number of trees on the planet by half, which is "astronomical."

Still, the trend of tree growth in the U.S. is encouraging. Trees clean pollutants from the air, absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen. They're also home to innumerable species of life around the world.

Look at that tree just crushing it out there. Photo by John Mark Arnold/Unsplash.

In short, trees are awesome and we should have as many of them as possible. So go outside and tell a tree you love it.

Seriously. Go hug a tree. It's not that weird, I promise.

Correction 5/26/2017: A previous version of this story stated that there are 3 billion trees on the planet. The Nature study found 3 trillion, not billion. Even better.