With all the talk about global climate change, the success of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, and the conflicting but generally grim messages from scientists, governments, and media the world over, are you curious what could happen if the seas do start to rise? If current trends continue, over the next few hundred years, sea levels could rise by several meters, submerging a huge amount of coastal land.

Flood Maps uses NASA elevation data and Google Maps to create an optimistic simulation of what might happen if the sea level rises as expected. With the page’s controls, you can change the simulated amount of rise from 0 meters to 14 meters, and then explore the world to see what changes.

In the image above, poor New York City and New Jersey are substantially underwater as the rise hits the 14 meter mark. Yikes! This is an easy-to-understand depiction of what things could be like a few generations down the line unless we start making changes now.

[Via Treehugger.]

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