How rising sea levels would affect the seven continents
These animations follow a request made in the comments to the video • What will the Earth look like with ri... , showing how the Earth would look for increasing sea levels. While the previous video showed a general 2D view, and two 3D views from circular orbits, this animation shows views from seven different fixed points of observation, featuring the seven continents.
Before you all start buying land in Tibet, be aware that the sea level rises of up to 1000 meters shown here are not realistic. The estimated mean sea level rise from 1900 to 2018 is of 15 to 25 centimeters (6 to 10 inches). In the video • Tutorial: How can we measure the mean... , I explain how these mean sea level measurements have been obtained.The current worst case scenario predicts a rise of the average sea level of 3.9 meters (13 feet) by 2150, in case no reduction of greenhouse gas emission is achieved, see https://www.climate.gov/news-features... . If all ice in the world's glaciers and polar caps were to melt, the sea level would rise by about 60 to 70 meters. Still, even mean sea level rises of a couple of meters would cause problems for several low-lying coastal areas and islands.
This animation uses the so-called Blue Marble Earth map, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bl... , in 2,560 × 1,280 resolution. I identified the dominant color of the Oceans, and declared all pixels having a nearby color as being in the domain of the wave, while the other pixels' color is used to draw the continents. A few areas of shallow sea with a different color appear therefore as parts of the land masses.
The land masses have been drawn with a varying altitude, which has been greatly exaggerated for visibility. The altitudes are taken from the digital elevation model (DEM) available in the file https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... , also in 2,560 × 1,280 resolution.
One difficulty in making the simulation was that the DEM data set uses only 128 different height values, which gives steps of about 35 m. Using the data as is would have given a result where the sea area changes by large patches at discrete times. To avoid that, I preprocessed the data, making them more smooth, essentially feeding them into the heat equation and let it evolve for a short time. While this makes the change more continuous, it may degrade the precision to some extent.
The video has seven parts, focusing on the seven continents:
North America: 0:00
South America: 1:44
Europe: 3:28
Africa: 5:12
Asia: 6:56
Australia/Oceania: 8:39
Antarctica: 10:24
Render times:
Part 1 - 19 minutes 56 seconds
Part 2 - 20 minutes 30 seconds
Part 3 - 20 minutes 16 seconds
Part 4 - 21 minutes 38 seconds
Part 5 - 20 minutes 51 seconds
Part 6 - 20 minutes 32 seconds
Part 7 - 20 minutes 47 seconds
The color of the oceans is based on Viridis by Nathaniel J. Smith, Stefan van der Walt and Eric firing
https://github.com/BIDS/colormap
Music: Undercover Vampire Policeman by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/uvp/
Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/
See also https://images.math.cnrs.fr/Des-ondes... for more explanations (in French) on a few previous simulations of wave equations.
C code: https://github.com/nilsberglund-orlea...
https://www.idpoisson.fr/berglund/sof...
Many thanks to Marco Mancini and Julian Kauth for helping me to accelerate my code!
#rising_sea_levels #earth #climatechange
