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etalian
Mar 20, 2006

Post you favorite US ecological diasters which will happen in the next 50-100 years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AhTGK1ybkk

My favs

1. Florida Underwater due global warming and the state government banned even researching possible scenarios

drown your neighborhood map tool

https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#12/40.7298/-74.0070?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=5&unit=feet&pois=hide



2. Arizona/CA to deplete aquifer reserves due to agriculture



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-of-arizona.html

quote:

At the meeting, residents accused farmers of sucking the water out from under them and the state of shirking its responsibilities. Lacey, the A.D.W.R. official, argued that the state couldn’t put water back into their wells. The only solution for homeowners, the officials explained, was to chase the water downward, by deepening their wells a few hundred feet. The cost of this, residents knew, was $15,000 to $30,000 — as much as half the value of some homes in the valley.

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Kak
Sep 27, 2002
I'm the underwater nuclear power plant

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.

I'm the thousands of earthquakes occurring in Oklahoma for no reason at all, certainly not fracking

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/byregion/oklahoma/OKeqanimation.php

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.

Also arctic sea ice that keeps dipping below 2 standard deviations from the mean

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.



That's only current yearly deaths specifically talking about diseases caused by pollution. In our glorious future, we can easily surpass that :patriot:


http://ar5-syr.ipcc.ch/topic_summary.php

hallebarrysoetoro
Jun 14, 2003
lets shoot our guns at the great filter

maybe that will get us past it

Jose
Jul 24, 2007

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer
does this count?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

quote:

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

...

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs fema’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.


While the Pacific Northwest is horrifyingly unprepared for an eventually inevitable high magnitude earthquake, the resulting tsunami is probably not going to be as apocalyptic as the article implies because the high pop Washington areas like Seattle are protected by Puget Sound and the high pop Oregon areas like Portland are too far inland. Also it doesn't really count as an ecological impact; the reason I put the earthquakes from Oklahoma up there is they're almost entirely caused by wastewater injection, a type of pollution, and it probably hasn't done great things to the regional water quality.

Edit: I guess the relative lowering of a big chunk of coast into the sea will impact the forests and stuff so alright you get a pass just this one time okay
Double edit: I want to emphasize that the author of that piece is a huge idiot as they unironically cite San Andreas, the movie, as an example of what might happen in a big earthquake. Also the pre-corrected article cited Portland as in the tsunami zone conveying the inability of the author to even glance at a map before metaphorically hitting submit on their dumb post

Uranium Phoenix has issued a correction as of 02:24 on Jul 23, 2018

Astrofig
Oct 26, 2009
My city has a landfill where Manhattan Project nuclear leftovers were buried. Said landfill is also now on fire, and there's concern it could reach the nuclear waste and start pluming toxic/radioactive smoke.

So, that.

ur in my world now
Jun 5, 2006

Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was


Smellrose

Astrofig posted:

My city has a landfill where Manhattan Project nuclear leftovers were buried. Said landfill is also now on fire, and there's concern it could reach the nuclear waste and start pluming toxic/radioactive smoke.

So, that.

west lake?

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DEEP STATE PLOT
Aug 13, 2008

Yes...Ha ha ha...YES!



the us won't even see that big an ecological disaster in the coming decades. the places that will see those ecological disasters are far, far less prepared to deal with them and we will have a worldwide refugee crisis on a scale never before seen, and the western world will go full fascism as a result to keep the refugees out. have fun~

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