13.1 million Americans affected by rising sea levels, report warns

A new report warned Monday that about 13.1 million Americans living along coastlines could face flooding by the end of the century due to rising sea levels.（People's Daily Online/Bella Qiu)

San Francisco, Mar. 14, 2016----A new report warned Monday that about 13.1 million Americans living along coastlines could face flooding by the end of the century due to rising sea levels.

According to the study published Monday in the science journal Nature Climate Change, as many as 13.1 million coastal dwellers could be forced to relocate by rising sea levels, the number is three times higher than previously estimated.

The study revealed that if the sea level rose 35.4 inches by the year 2100, some 4.2 million people in U.S. coastal regions would be at risk of flooding. But if the sea level were to rise by 70.9 inches, the number of those at risk of flooding would reach 13.1 million.

For those who live in California, as many as 1 million residents could be affected. San Mateo County, located at the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area, ranks seventh with a potential 249,020 residents at risk.

Rising sea levels, widely believed to be the result of climate change, are threatening to wipe out some of the world's island nations, such as the Maldives in South Asia that scientists say could vanish under water this century.

While NASA's study in February finds a different result. A study published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the University of California, Irvine, shows that while ice sheets and glaciers continue to melt, changes in weather and climate over the past decade have caused Earth’s continents to soak up and store an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, temporarily slowing the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent.

The study was the first of its kind to observe global patterns of changes in land water storage, with wet regions getting more wet and dry areas getting drier.