Sea level rise map
Raise the ocean by a metre, by ten, or by every glacier on Earth, and see exactly which streets stop existing.
Open the sea level rise mapWhat this map does
Pick any coast and set a new sea level between 1 and 70 metres. Every piece of land lower than that mark and connected to the sea goes under and stays under. The map shades the drowned area, measures how far the coastline moved inland, and counts everyone who used to live on the land that is now seabed.
This is the slow catastrophe, not the violent one. There are no waves here and no way back: the water simply sits at its new level for good.
How much will the sea actually rise?
Far less than this map allows, within a human lifetime. The IPCC's likely range for the year 2100 is roughly 0.3 to 1 metre depending on emissions, with about 2 metres not ruled out if the Antarctic ice sheets behave badly.
The large numbers on the slider are not forecasts — they are inventories of the ice that exists:
- 7 metres — all of Greenland's ice
- 58 metres — all of Antarctica's ice
- 66 metres — every glacier and ice sheet on Earth
Melting Antarctica takes millennia, not decades. The map goes to 70 metres because the question "what would be left?" is worth being able to answer, not because anyone expects it this century.
Why your low-lying city sometimes stays dry
This is the detail that separates an honest flood map from a coloured-in contour line. Water only reaches ground that connects to the sea through cells that are themselves below the new level. A basin ringed by higher ground stays dry no matter how deep it is — which is why the Dead Sea shore, Death Valley and much of the Caspian depression survive a 70-metre rise untouched.
Two known limits: land already below 0.6 metres that touches the sea is treated as sea from the start, and a grid cell tens of metres wide can miss a narrow dike, canal or barrier island. Dikes count only if they are big enough to show up in the elevation data, so the Netherlands floods more readily here than it would in reality.
Places worth looking at
- Miami at +10 m — the city with almost nothing above the water
- Amsterdam at +5 m — a country built below sea level already
- Dhaka at +5 m — the delta where the most people live lowest
- Singapore at +2 m — the plausible end of the century, not the fantasy end
- Cairo at +66 m — every glacier gone, and how far up the Nile the sea reaches
What the map leaves out
Tides, storm surge and waves — all of which arrive on top of the mean level and do the actual damage decades before the permanent flood. Land that is sinking under its own cities, which in Jakarta outruns the sea by a wide margin. Sediment that builds deltas back up. And any human response at all: no dikes get built, no one moves.
Everyone living on flooded land is counted as displaced, not killed — a rising sea gives people years of warning, which is the one mercy it has over everything else on this site.
Questions
Where does the elevation data come from?
Mapbox Terrain-RGB tiles, at roughly 7 metres per grid cell for a small area and 30–80 metres for a whole city. Population and city boundaries come from OpenStreetMap.
Is this the same as a flood zone map?
No. Official flood maps model storms, rivers and drainage over a fixed time horizon. This one answers a simpler question: if the ocean stood permanently at this height, what would be underwater?
Why does it say displaced instead of killed?
Because the sea rises over decades. The number is everyone whose home ends up below the waterline, not a death toll. For the violent version of the same flood, use the tsunami simulator.
Can I see a specific year, like 2050 or 2100?
Not directly — the map takes a height, not a date, because the date is the part nobody can pin down. For a 2050 scenario set 0.2–0.3 m; for 2100 try 0.3–1 m, and 2 m for the pessimistic tail.
Further reading: Sea level rise: how much, how fast, and which cities it reaches first
Open the sea level rise map