Saturday, May 06, 2006

See if your home will escape rising sea levels!

A friend has just alerted me to one of the best uses of online mapping software yet devised -- helping you plan your future relocation once rising sea levels have inundated your home! You can use the handy pulldown menu in the upper left corner to choose the potential increase in sea level. In case you're wondering, which you ought to be, some predictions call for a 7 meter rise over the next 50 years. (For those unfamiliar with the exotic, Eurotic ways of the metric system, a "meter" is just over three feet, what we right-thinking folk call a "yard". Fascinating, eh? It's like taking a trip to Europe, it is!)

As luck would have it, my Oakland, CA domicile will escape a 7 meter rise by at least a half-mile. News this good makes me want to go burn some tires in the yard, barbecue an endangered salmon, and finally, as the sun sets behind a pretty petro-haze, drive a vintage 8-cylinder automobile to the beach and leave it idling while I frolic in the ever-rising tide.

For the rest of you closer to sea level, fret not, many a happy home has been built atop stilts. In other good news, local lagoon Lake Merritt will fulfill its destiny and finally be reunited with the sea.

Yes, now you can see Waterworld the way it should've been made -- on a global scale, and without Kevin Costner.

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