NASA Says A Moon 'Wobble' Will Lead To Major Flooding In The US Within 15 Years
Increasing high-tide floods will impact every coast.
A new study from NASA has revealed that a moon "wobble" will cause increased flooding as it coincides with rising sea levels, and it will have an effect on every U.S. coast.
The wobble in the moon's orbit is a regular occurrence, but what's new is how its effect on the moon's gravitational pull, which causes the Earth's tides, will combine with rising sea levels as a result of climate change.
NASA said that the next time the lunar cycle amplifies the tides will be in the mid-2030s. The alignment of rising sea levels with the lunar cycle will cause coastal cities all over the mainland and Hawaii to start a decade of "rapidly increasing" high-tide floods.
Not only will high tide floods be more severe and occur more often, but they will also sometimes happen in clusters that last a month or longer, which means people in coastal cities could be dealing with floods every day. It all depends on how the moon, the sun and Earth line up with each other, NASA said.
Only coastlines that are far north like Alaska's will be spared from this for another decade or so, the study predicted, because the land is actually rising due to "geological processes."
According to a study released in 2020 about how global warming could impact cities around the world, Boston and Chicago are the two U.S. cities expected to feel the effects of climate change the most by 2050.