
What Climate Change Looks Like: Miami’s $300M Pumps - e15ctr0n
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015-paris-climate-talks/what-climate-change-looks-like-miami-pumps
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DrScump
"Researchers at the University of Miami have been carefully measuring sea
levels at Virginia Key, just south of Miami Beach, for nearly two decades, and
say that in that time the sea has risen nearly four inches."

There has been no land subsidence at all, apparently.

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dalke
At Virginia Key? It's subsiding at about 0.17±0.09mm/year, says
[http://www.fsbpa.com/documents/Florida%20Sea%20Level_rev0404...](http://www.fsbpa.com/documents/Florida%20Sea%20Level_rev04042008.pdf)
. "This very preliminary value ... with its very large uncertainty ... should
be viewed very cautiously, but a sinking Florida is in general agreement with
geophysical models of Earth’s changing shape due to post-glacial rebound from
the last ice age."

But the relative rise (same reference, and with a longer baseline) for Miami
Beach is 2.4mm/year, so more than 10x faster than can be explained by
subsidence.

(Also, unlike parts of the US which are sinking due to overpumping from an
aquifer, in coastal Florida, seawater will fill in the parts of the freshwater
lens which were overpumped. And while the Miami metro area pulls water from
the Biscayne aquifer, the relative sea level rise is pretty consistent across
Florida, including Cedar Key, which is a relatively isolated location with low
population.)

The NYT piece references [http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/blog/2014/10/03/sea-
level-rise-in...](http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/blog/2014/10/03/sea-level-rise-
in-miami/) which in turn points to
[http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8723214](http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8723214)
as the measurement source. That shows that the numbers are given with respect
to NAVD88, and not some relative sea level to a survey point on land.

Indeed, that's why the data set for this NYT article and my earlier URL to the
report describing a sinking Florida only starts in the late 1990s - that's
when the CORS sites (see
[http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/](http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/) ) were set up
to give absolute positions based on satellite positioning.

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jonhankok
Lol. Snake oil...

