Tag: infrastructure

NYC’s Congestion Pricing Should Have Been the Future

[ad_1]

On Wednesday, New York governor Kathy Hochul shocked the state and the country when she announced she would indefinitely shelve New York City’s long-in-development congestion pricing scheme. The policy, in the works since 2007 and set to begin in just three weeks, was designed to relieve car traffic, curb road deaths, and send a billion dollars in annual funding to the city’s transit system by charging drivers up to $15 a day to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan, with rates highest at “peak hours.” (Truck drivers and some bus drivers could have paid more than $36 daily.) At heart, the idea is straightforward, if controversial: Make people pay for the roads they use.

But congestion pricing was also set to become one of the most ambitious American climate projects, maybe ever. It was meant to coax people out of their gas-guzzling vehicles, which are alone responsible for some 22 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and onto subways, buses, bicycles, and their feet. Policymakers, researchers, and environment nerds the world over have concluded that, even if the transition to electric vehicles were to happen at lightning speed, avoiding the worst of climate change is going to require fewer cars overall.

Now, the movement has seen a serious setback, in a country where decades of car-centric planning decisions mean many can only imagine getting around in one very specific way. Just a few years ago, cities from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Chicago began to study what pricing roads might look like. “Cities were watching to see what would happen in New York,” says Sarah Kaufman, who directs the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. “Now they can call it a ‘failure’ because it didn’t go through.”

On Wednesday, Hochul said her about-face had to do with concerns about the city’s post-pandemic recovery. The congestion pricing plan faced lawsuits from New Jersey, where commuters argue they would face unfair financial burdens. Cameras and gantries, acquired and positioned to charge drivers while entering the zone, have already been installed in Manhattan, to the tune of some $500 million.

Kaufman, who says she was “flabbergasted” by Governor Hochul’s sudden announcement, says she is not sure where the policy goes from here. “If we can’t make courageous, and potentially less popular, moves in a city that has transit readily accessible, then I’m wondering where this can happen,” she says.

Other global cities have seen success with congestion schemes. London’s program, implemented in 2003, is still controversial among residents, but the government reports it has cut traffic in the targeted zone by a third. One 2020 study suggests the program has reduced pollutants, though exemptions for diesel buses have blunted its emissions effects. Stockholm’s program, launched in 2006, upped the city’s transit ridership, reduced the number of total miles locals traveled by car, and decreased emissions between 10 and 14 percent.

But in New York, the future of the program is unclear, and local politicians are currently scrambling to figure out how to cover the transit budget hole that would result from a last-minute nixing of the fee scheme. The city’s transit system is huge and sprawling: Five million people ride the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s buses and subways, almost double the number that fly every day in the US.

In New York, drivers entering the zone below Manhattan’s 60th Street would have been charged peak pricing of $15, but would have only faced the charge once a day. They would have paid $3.75 for off-peak hours. Taxi and ride-hail trips in the zone would have seen extra fees. After years of controversy and public debate, the state had carved out some congestion charge exemptions: some vehicles carrying people with disabilities would not have been charged, lower-income residents of the zone would have received a tax credit for their tolls; and low-income drivers would have been eligible for a 50 percent discount.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 7, 2024
How Many Charging Stations Would We Need to Totally Replace Gas Stations?

[ad_1]

Buyers curious about making the switch to electric vehicles have made it clear in survey after survey after survey: Charging kind of freaks them out.

In many ways, drivers report, owning an EV is the same if not better than owning a gas-powered car. But fueling an electric vehicle is different, and can be inconvenient depending on where you live, and is therefore sometimes scary to even those interested in buying electric.

The majority of today’s American EV owners charge at home, but more than 20 percent of US households don’t have access to consistent off-street parking where they can plug in overnight. The public charging network, meanwhile, can be spotty, and drivers have complained that chargers aren’t always well maintained or even functioning.

The good news is that automakers, governments, and other policy players realize the US has a charging problem. They want more people in electric cars. Automakers are scaling up EV production and want people to buy them, and legislators realize that nixing gas-powered cars in favor of zero-emissions electrics will be an important part of staving off the worst effects of climate change.

As a result of the early efforts to make the switch to EVs, the US currently has 188,600 public and private charging ports, and 67,900 charging stations, according to data collected by the US Department of Energy—figures that have more than doubled since 2020. Another 240 stations are currently planned. Compare that to today’s gas infrastructure: The country has about 145,000 gas fueling stations, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

At WIRED, the whole situation got us interested in a thought experiment: If we could magically snap our fingers and turn every auto electric, how many charging stations would the US need to add?

Number-crunchers at Coltura, an alternative fuel research and advocacy group, crunched the numbers:

The upshot? The nation needs to build lots and lots more chargers before it gets to full electrification, a point experts suggest should come in the 2040s. But the task may not be as insurmountable as it looks.

The number of public chargers will have to grow by a factor of six, as estimated by Matthew Metz, Coltura’s executive director, and Ron Barzilay, its data and policy associate. “We’re not necessarily off-track,” says Metz.

[ad_2]

Source link

May 27, 2024
As Questions Swirl Around Tesla’s Superchargers, the Race Is On to Fill the Power Gap

[ad_1]

Familiar says Revel is less concerned about the material effects of the Tesla layoff than the “cultural impact, tacking onto pessimism around EVs recently.”

New York City officials seem confident someone will fill in the Tesla-sized charging gap. City programs ensure “that any provider doing business in NYC has a reliable, growing customer base, and one provider backing out of a lease is a great opportunity for another to snap it up, especially if that site is power-ready,” a spokesperson for the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Jason Kersten, said in a statement.

In Maspeth, Gordon says he’s already heard from several charging companies interested in leasing the land once intended for Superchargers.

Power Puzzler

In recent months, the Tesla Supercharger network has been cited as a bright spot in a company troubled by new competition from Chinese car companies and legacy automakers, questions around the slackening electric vehicle market, falling revenues, and most recently, a series of rolling layoffs. Tesla customers have said the company’s public charging stations are generally reliable and well maintained, and a huge selling point for Tesla-curious buyers. Last summer, the energy research organization BloombergNEF predicted that Tesla could bring in $7.4 billion in charging revenue by the end of the decade, constituting some $740 million in profit—not a shabby side hustle for an auto manufacturer.

At the time of the reported layoffs, Tesla’s charging team had just pulled off a decisive coup by convincing the entire US auto industry to use its plug. In return, Tesla dangled to other automakers—and their customers—a public charging network that’s remarkably reliable and well developed, especially when compared to the shoddier records of their closest charging rivals.

In financial filings submitted just last week, Tesla previewed its expansion plans for its charging network. As other automakers adopt the Tesla plug, “we must correspondingly expand our network in order to ensure adequate availability to meet customer demands,” the company wrote.

Tesla last fall officially handed over work on the plug standard to the Society of Automotive Engineers, a global standards organization. Jeff Laskowski, a spokesman for the group, said that work to finish that plug standard was “well underway” and expected to wrap up by the end of this year.

It is not unusual for companies given government grants to change direction or give them back, sources involved in government grantmaking told WIRED. In statements and interviews, those involved in building, selling, and developing electric vehicle charging said that Tesla’s sudden about-face on charging might affect the short-term future of public charging infrastructure, but not the long-term electric transition.

A spokesperson for the federal Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the authority overseeing electric vehicle infrastructure in the US, said that, because each individual state runs a competitive process to choose who will build charging networks, “we don’t expect individual business decisions to impact EV charging projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” the 2021 federal legislation that earmarked money for the charging infrastructure.

Industry players said that while Tesla’s move was very unexpected, it could signal that the automaker believes other charging firms have caught up to it and are ready to take on the responsibility—and the capital costs—of building out the network that will make electric cars go.

Competitors said the abrupt shift might even be an opportunity. In a statement, Sara Rafalson, the executive vice president of policy and external affairs at the charging company EVgo, said her company would soon begin to build Tesla plugs onto its chargers. “We welcome the opportunity to serve more Tesla vehicles and remain steadfast in our commitment to serve all electric vehicle models,” she said.

[ad_2]

Source link

May 2, 2024
Luxury Airbnb High-Rises Are Reshaping Miami’s Skyline

[ad_1]

West Eleventh residences, a luxury building in downtown Miami slated to break ground this summer, promises “endless indulgences.” It will feature an entertainment center, food hall, and a resort pool with private lounges—no amenity is spared. But these condos are designed to lure more than just Miami residents. The tower is part of a new trend in which developers build apartments made for Airbnb, allowing them to be rented 365 days a year. The project even boasts the short-term rental platform as a branding partner.

The concept of an apartment complex built for Airbnb appears to have won over investors: West Eleventh’s 659 units are nearly sold out, at an average price of about $800,000, says Ryan Shear, managing partner with Property Markets Group, the tower’s developer. Buyers can choose to live there full-time, but their condo fees pay for a concierge who handles the logistics of renting their units out for short-term stays on Airbnb, from check-in to cleaning.

Miami is ground zero for a new experiment in urban development catalyzed by Airbnb. More than 10 condo buildings are in development or already open in the city that, like West Eleventh, will offer sleek apartments designed to be easy for owners to rent for short-term stays either occasionally or full-time. A January report from ISG World, a Florida-based luxury real estate firm, shows nearly 8,000 units that could become short-term rentals slated for construction for downtown neighborhoods in Miami. The developers aim to enable hosting without the grunt work—and passive rental income that truly doesn’t require a property owner to lift a finger.

For travelers the resulting package may sound like a familiar concept: the hotel. But it marks a push into a new type of stay for Airbnb. The platform started as an affordable way for travelers to stay in spare bedrooms, but it developed into a neighborhood-transforming behemoth stuffed with sleek, whole-home rentals decked out to draw luxury travelers, spring breakers, and bachelorette parties.

That’s been great for Airbnb’s bottom line, but it angered many locals, who complain about rising home and rent prices as well as trash, noise, and dangerous parties the guests can sometimes bring. These downtown Miami buildings—an experiment in a new type of almost-hotel—are underway as cities around the world look to restrict short-term rentals to combat rising housing costs. They could perhaps offer a way around regulations that have blocked short-term rentals and their hosts in some places, and create new types of properties for guests, rather than eating away at the current housing supply. But in this untested experiment, some housing experts say it’s possible built-for-Airbnb developments could also end up reducing the supply of new housing for long-term residents.

Jesse Stein, Airbnb’s global head of real estate, says the company doesn’t see these developments as a reversal of the type of unique stays that come from checking in with a host instead of a concierge. “You’re still staying with a host,” says Stein. “We don’t view it as a hotel. We still view it as an individual home.”

Stein says the fact that purpose-built Airbnb condos have sold quickly shows how many people want the opportunity to become short-term rental hosts. “This proved the concept that there is tremendous demand for a flexible lifestyle,” she says. More hosts means more bookings and fees for Airbnb, which is trying to sustain its growth and reported 2023 revenue was up 17 percent over the year before.

The short-term rental business is already booming in Miami, helping to make the city a testing ground for new ideas like the Airbnb towers. It’s home to the fourth-fastest-growing market for Airbnb in the US, according to AirDNA, which tracks the short-term rental platform. Winters with perfect summer weather and burgeoning art and tech scenes provide plenty of reasons to visit. Living in Miami part-time has always been common for snowbirds, and the city also has lots of real estate investors from Latin America and Europe.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 17, 2024
No, Dubai’s Floods Weren’t Caused By Cloud Seeding

[ad_1]

Dubai is underwater. Heavy storms have caused flash flooding across the United Arab Emirates, leading to shocking scenes circulating on social media: Cars abandoned by the roadside, planes sloshing through flooded runways. Hundreds of flights have been canceled at Dubai’s busy international airport, and at least 18 people have died in neighboring Oman.

News reports and social media posts were quick to point the blame at cloud seeding. The UAE has a long-running program for trying to squeeze more rain out of the clouds that pass over the normally arid region—it has a team of pilots who spray salt particles into passing storms to encourage more water to form. The floods were positioned as a cautionary tale by some: Here’s what happens when you mess with nature. Even Bloomberg reported that cloud seeding had worsened the flooding.

The truth is more complicated. I’ve spent the last few months reporting on cloud seeding in the UAE for an upcoming WIRED feature, and while it’s true that the UAE has been running cloud seeding missions this week—it performs more than 300 a year—it’s a stretch to say that it was responsible for the floods. (In fact, as we were preparing this story for publication on Wednesday morning, the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday.)

There are a few reasons for this. First: Even the most optimistic assessments of cloud seeding say that it can increase rainfall by a maximum of 25 percent annually. In other words, it would have rained anyway, and if cloud seeding did have an impact, it would only have been to slightly increase the amount of precipitation that fell. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of cloud seeding in warm climates, and even if it does work, cloud seeding can’t produce rain out of thin air, it can only enhance what’s already in the sky.

Secondly, seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, but means that it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai. Most of the scientists I’ve spoken to say the impact of cloud seeding has a very small, localized effect and is unlikely to cause flooding in other areas. But perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.

It’s exciting to point the finger at a scary technology, but the real cause of the flooding is likely more banal: Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall. The city has expanded rapidly over the last few decades, with little attention paid in the past to infrastructure like storm drains that could help it deal with a sudden influx of water. It’s largely concrete and glass, and there’s very little green space to soak up rainfall. The result is chaos whenever it rains—though to be fair, most cities would struggle to deal with a year’s worth of rain falling in 12 hours.

However, climate change may also be playing a role. As the planet heats up, the complex weather dynamics of the region are shifting and changing in ways that may bring more violent storms. City planners around the world are trying to make their cities “spongier” to help deal with flash flooding and save more water for drier parts of the year. Instead of using cloud seeding to turn the sky into a sponge, Dubai would be better off trying to turn the city into one.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 17, 2024
US Infrastructure Is Broken. Here’s an $830 Million Plan to Fix It

[ad_1]

There’s one word that will get any American fuming, regardless of their political inclination: infrastructure. Pothole-pocked roads, creaky bridges, and half-baked public transportation bind us nationally like little else can. And that was before climate change’s coastal flooding, extreme heat, and supercharged wildfires came around to make things even worse.

US infrastructure was designed for the climate we enjoyed 50, 75, even 100 years ago. Much of it simply isn’t holding up, endangering lives and snapping supply chains. To bring all those roads, railways, bridges, and whole cities into the modern era, the Biden-Harris administration last week announced almost $830 million in grants through 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The long list of projects includes improved evacuation routes in Alaska, a new bridge in Montana, restored wetlands in Pennsylvania, and a whole bunch of retrofits in between.

“We know that if we want to build infrastructure that lasts for the next 50 or 100 years, it’s got to look different than the last 50 or 100 years,” says US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

WIRED sat down with Buttigieg to talk about the bipartisan appeal of infrastructure, utilizing nature instead of fighting it, and the irresistible triple payoff of getting people out of cars and into buses and trains. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Matt Simon: The United States is a very diverse place, climate-wise. We’ve got all these deserts and extreme heat, coastlines and sea level rise, and increasingly extreme rainfall. How does this new funding go toward managing all that?

Secretary Buttigieg: While every part of the country is different, every part of the country sees transportation systems impacted by the climate and other threats. It can be wildfires, it can be floods, sea level rise, mudslides, droughts, or even earthquakes. All of these things can impact the durability of our transportation systems. And many of these things are getting more extreme.

One of the more counterintuitive consequences of climate change is heavier rainfall. A lot of this funding is going toward retrofitting infrastructure to adapt to those sorts of deluges. What are the options?

In Cincinnati, for example, we’re shoring up retaining walls and actually installing sensors in hills to get ahead of an issue where a hillslide, caused by intense rainfall, would impact a road. In West Memphis, we’re investing in natural infrastructure. What’s interesting about that case is it’s not actually the road itself—we’re investing in the wetlands around the road to make flooding less likely. That’s part of how we protect supply chains that run along I-55 and I-40.

And then sometimes you’re facing a one-two punch. In Colorado, for example, I-70 was impacted by a combination of fires and floods. A wildfire will come through, it’ll undermine the trees and root structures that hold soil together, it’ll be followed by a flood. And then you’ll be more likely to have a mudslide, which took out I-70 for an extended amount of time a few years ago. So we are seeing that a lot of times—something that as a former mayor I think about a lot—which is just the struggle against water in the wrong places. It’s certainly a big part of what we have to deal with in our transportation systems.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 16, 2024
San Francisco’s Train System Still Uses Floppy Disks—and Will for Years

[ad_1]

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs the city’s Muni Metro light rail, claims to be the first US agency to adopt floppy disks. But today, the SFMTA is eager to abandon its reliance on 5¼-inch floppy disks—just give it about six years and a few hundred million dollars more.

Members of the SFMTA recently spoke with the ABC7 Bay Area News and detailed the agency’s use of three 5¼-inch floppy disks every morning. The floppies have been part of Muni Metro’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) since its installation in a Market Street subway stop in 1998. The ATCS has multiple components, “including computers onboard the trains that are tied into propulsion and brake systems, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable signal wires,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, told Ars Technica.

The floppy disks are for loading the software running the central servers, Roccaforte said:

When a train enters the subway, its onboard computer connects to the train control system to run the train in automatic mode, where the trains drive themselves while the operators supervise. When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to manual operation on the street.

Roccaforte said initial planning for an overhaul of the ATCS, including moving off floppy disks, started in 2018 and was expected to take a decade from initial planning to completion. Because of an 18-month-long Covid-19-related hiatus, completion is expected in 2029 to 2030. SFMTA expects to settle on a contractor by early 2025 and will release a detailed project timeline then.

“Ultimately, our goal is to have a single train control system for the entire rail system,” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation, told ABC7.

Floppy Flaws

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” some say. But while the floppy-disk-reliant train control system is currently working, there are challenges to relying on the dated technology, which SFMTA has highlighted for years.

The transportation body says the train control system was built to last for just 20 to 25 years, meaning it surpassed its expected lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, said to be composed of local and national transit experts, recommended replacing the transit control system within five to seven years.

When asked how “dire” it is to upgrade off of floppy disks, Tumlin told ABC7 that it’s all about risk.

“The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” Tumlin told ABC7.

Previously, the transportation agency claimed that the ATCS had become harder and more expensive to maintain over time. It has also discussed the challenges it has in finding workers who know how to use the dated system.

“We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the ’90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 11, 2024
Mexico City’s Metro System Is Sinking Fast. Yours Could Be Next

[ad_1]

Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that that area was having differential displacements,” says Solano‐Rojas. “We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, it looks like something could be happening here in the future.’ We think that it’s not a coincidence that we found this.” Solano‐Rojas was careful to say that the potential contribution of subsidence to the disaster would require further evaluation, and official investigations have cited construction errors and do not mention subsidence.

For this study, the researchers looked at the Metro infrastructure aboveground, not the subway segments—basically, the parts of the system they could verify visually. (The photo below shows the differential subsidence of columns supporting an overpass.) But by providing the system’s operators with information on how quickly its infrastructure might be subsiding, their work can hopefully inform interventions. Engineers can add material underneath railways, for instance, to restore lost elevation. Bolstering subways, though, could be much more challenging. “We don’t have a concrete solution for that,” says Shirzaei. “In most cases, when that happens, it just results in shutting down the project and trying to open a new lane.”

Courtesy of Darío Solano‐Rojas

This isn’t just Mexico City’s problem. Earlier this year, Shirzaei and his colleagues found that the East Coast’s infrastructure is in serious trouble due to slower—yet steady—subsidence. They calculated that 29,000 square miles of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to sinking of up to 0.08 inches a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. Some 1,400 square miles are sinking up to 0.20 inches a year.

Differential subsidence is not only threatening railways, the researchers found, but all kinds of other critical infrastructure, like levees and airports. A metropolis like New York City has the added problem of sheer weight pushing down on the ground, which alone leads to subsidence. The Bay Area, too, is sinking. On either coast, subsidence is greatly exacerbating the problem of sea level rise: The land is going down just as the water is coming up.

Wherever in the world it’s happening, people have to stop overextracting groundwater to slow subsidence. Newfangled systems are already relieving pressure on aquifers. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to recycle toilet water into drinking water, for instance. And more cities are deploying “sponge” infrastructure—lots of green spaces that allow rainwater to soak into the underlying aquifer, essentially reinflating the land to fend off subsidence. Such efforts are increasingly urgent as climate change exacerbates droughts in many parts of the world, including Mexico City, putting ever more pressure on groundwater supplies.

With increasing satellite data, cities can get a better handle on the subsidence they can’t immediately avoid. “I really feel like governments have a chance to use these kinds of studies to have a more structured plan of action,” says Solano‐Rojas.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 10, 2024
A Ghost Ship’s Doomed Journey Through the Gate of Tears

[ad_1]

The ballistic missile hit the Rubymar on the evening of February 18. For months, the cargo ship had been shuttling around the Arabian Sea, uneventfully calling at local ports. But now, taking on water in the bottleneck of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, its two dozen crew issued an urgent call for help and prepared to abandon ship.

Over the next two weeks—while the crew were ashore—the “ghost ship” took on a life of its own. Carried by currents and pushed along by the wind, the 17-meter-long, 27-meter-wide Rubymar drifted approximately 30 nautical miles north, where it finally sank—becoming the most high-profile wreckage during a months-long barrage of missiles and drones launched by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The attacks have upended global shipping.

But the Rubymar wasn’t the only casualty. During its final journey, three internet cables laid on the seafloor in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait were damaged. The drop in connectivity impacted millions of people, from nearby East Africa to thousands of miles away in Vietnam. It’s believed the ship’s trailing anchor may have broken the cables while it drifted. The Rubymar also took 21,000 metric tons of fertilizer to its watery grave—a potential environmental disaster in waiting.

An analysis from WIRED—based on satellite imagery, interviews with maritime experts, and new internet connectivity data showing the cables went offline within minutes of each other—tracks the last movements of the doomed ship. While our analysis cannot definitively show that the anchor caused the damage to the crucial internet cables—that can only be determined by an upcoming repair mission—multiple experts conclude it is the most likely scenario.

The damage to the internet cables comes when the security of subsea infrastructure—including internet cables and energy pipelines—has catapulted up countries’ priorities. Politicians have become increasingly concerned about the critical infrastructure since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022 and a subsequent string of potential sabotage, including the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. As Houthi weapons keep hitting ships in the Red Sea region, there are worries the Rubymar may not be the last shipwreck.

The Rubymar’s official trail goes cold on February 18. At 8 pm local time, reports emerged that a ship in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is also known as the Gate of Tears or the Gate of Grief, had been attacked. Two anti-ship ballistic missiles were fired from “Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen,” US Central Command said. Ninety minutes after the warnings arrived, at around 9:30 pm, the Rubymar broadcast its final location using the automatic identification system (AIS), a GPS-like positioning system used to track ships.

As water started pouring into the hull, engine room, and machinery room, the crew’s distress call was answered by the Lobivia—a nearby container ship—and a US-led coalition warship. By 1:57 am on February 19, the crew was reported safe. That afternoon, the 11 Syrians, six Egyptians, three Indians, and four Filipinos who were on board arrived at the Port of Djibouti. “We do not know the coordinates of Rubymar,” Djibouti’s port authority posted on X.

Satellite images picked up the Rubymar, its path illuminated by an oil slick, two days later, on February 20. Although the crew dropped the ship’s anchor during the rescue, the ship drifted north, further up the strait in the direction of the Red Sea.

[ad_2]

Source link

April 1, 2024
Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea-Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking

[ad_1]

Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical tap is still on—as rapid warming turns more and more polar ice into ocean water—and at the same time the tub is sinking into the floor.

An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea-level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea-level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines.

With that subsidence in mind, the study finds that those coastal areas in the US could see 500 to 700 square miles of additional land flooded by 2050, impacting an additional 176,000 to 518,000 people and causing up to $100 billion of further property damage. That’s on top of baseline estimates of the damage so far up to 2020, which has affected 530 to 790 square miles and 525,000 to 634,000 people, and cost between $100 billion and $123 billion.

Overall, the study finds that 24 of the 32 coastal cities studied are subsiding by more than 2 millimeters a year. (One millimeter equals 0.04 inches.) “The combination of both the land sinking and the sea rising leads to this compounding effect of exposure for people,” says the study’s lead author, Leonard Ohenhen, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech. “When you combine both, you have an even greater hazard.”

The issue is that cities have been preparing for projections of geocentric sea-level rise, for instance with sea walls. Through no fault of their own—given the infancy of satellite subsidence monitoring—they’ve been missing half the problem. “All the adaptation strategies at the moment that we have in place are based on rising sea levels,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and a coauthor of the paper. “It means that the majority—if not all—of those adaptation strategies are overestimating the time that we have for those extreme consequences of sea-level rise. Instead of having 40 years to prepare, in some cases we have only 10.”

Subsidence can happen naturally, for instance when loose sediments settle over time, or because of human activity, such as when cities extract too much groundwater and their aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. In extreme cases, this can result in dozens of feet of subsidence. The sheer weight of coastal cities like New York is also pushing down on the ground, leading to further sinking.

Courtesy of Leonard Ohenhen, Virginia Tech

[ad_2]

Source link

March 6, 2024