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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For most of his life, Steve Salem has lived an intimate relationship with the tides.
Salem has been a ship captain for 50 years and designed and built his 65-foot vessel by hand.
“Noah and I are related in some way,” says Salem, 75, with his silver beard that evokes Ernest Hemingway.
Salem is well aware of how the sun and moon affect the tides and has an innate sense for them, but the tides here are beginning to test even his intuition.
He and his wife live in a rust-colored ranch-style home on a tributary of the St. Johns River, Florida’s longest. In 2017, before they moved in, their house flooded during Hurricane Irma. In 2022, it flooded again during the unexpected Hurricane Nicole. But Salem believes the house is sturdy and will continue to handle the tides.
“I’m a water dog through and through. I’m always on the water,” says Salem, who prefers to be known by the nickname Captain Steve. “I worry about things that I need to do something about. If you can’t do anything about it, there’s no point in worrying.”
Across the southern US, some of the most extreme sea levels on Earth are accelerating, causing high tides that have alarmed scientists such as Professor Jeff Chanton of Florida State University’s School of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.
“It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would have thought it would be a gradual increase, something that would happen gradually. But this is a big change.”
Since 1900, sea levels around the world have been rising at about 1.5 millimeters per year. This rate is unprecedented for at least the past 3,000 years and is generally attributed to melting ice sheets and glaciers, and ocean expansion due to warmer waters. Since the mid-20th century, this rate has accelerated, exceeding 3 millimeters per year since 1992.
In the South, the pace is set to accelerate, jumping from about 1.7 millimeters per year at the start of the century to at least 8.4 millimeters by 2021, according to a 2023 projection. study The prediction, published in the journal Nature Communications, was based on tide gauge records across the region. In the coastal city of Pensacola, west Florida, precipitation has spiked to about 11 millimeters per year by the end of 2021.
“I don’t think people have any idea what’s coming, because they have no way of imagining it based on their own experience or the experience of the last 250 years,” says Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not like, ‘I’ve seen it, I know what it’s like,’ because they’ve never seen it.”
“It’s the same everywhere, from North Carolina to the Florida Keys to Alabama,” he said. “All of these areas are extremely vulnerable.”
The acceleration could amplify the impacts of hurricanes, including storm surges, flood damage and land loss. In recent years, storm surges have coincided with record-breaking hurricane seasons, pushing storm surges higher and further inland. Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwest Florida in 2022, The costliest hurricanes This is the largest hurricane in state history and the third-costliest in the United States after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
“You don’t even need a big storm anymore, you just have these compounding effects,” said Rachel Klitas, policy director at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “All of a sudden you have flooding that has much more impact, and frankly, a lot of our infrastructure, like stormwater infrastructure, wasn’t built for this.”
