New York City may soon be swallowed by the same waters that built it. A new interactive feature by John Surico (Center for an Urban Future) and Nick Underwood (The New York Times) takes you inside the city’s potential flooded future–and the results are both mesmerizing and alarming.
The tool visualizes how rising sea levels, heavier rainfall, and storm surges could reshape NYC by 2080.
Entire neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are shown underwater, while parts of Lower Manhattan face repeated tidal flooding. Nearly 30% of the city’s land could be at risk, affecting about 1.4 million New Yorkers.
💧 The City’s Race Against Water
Scientists have been warning us for years: New York City is sinking, about 0.06 inches per year, according to NASA.
Add to that the 1.7-trillion-pound weight of its skyscrapers–which geologists say is pushing the city deeper into the ground–and the picture gets even more bleak.
🌿 Can NYC Actually Survive Rising Seas?
Unfortunately, the city’s flood defenses weren’t designed for what’s coming.
Its stormwater system, built in the 1970s, can only handle 1.75 inches of rain per hour–a limit surpassed multiple times in the past five years in Central Park alone.
Climate experts say survival depends on three strategies:
- Absorb – add more green spaces and wetlands to soak up rainfall
- Fortify – build coastal barriers and seawalls
- Retreat – move residents out of high-risk areas
Some of this is already happening: rain gardens in Gowanus, flood-proof parks in Queens, and the Bluebelt project in Staten Island, which is one of NYC’s most successful resiliency efforts.
But, as the new feature shows, it’s still not enough. Ecologist Eric Sanderson of the New York Botanical Garden stated:
Our imaginations haven’t caught up to what nature can and will do.
🌆 A Glimpse Of What’s To Come
The NYT’s new interactive isn’t just a visualization–it’s a wake up call.
From ghost neighborhoods along the coast to engineered wetlands that could one day save them, it reveals the stark choices ahead–because unfortunately the question is no longer if New York will flood, it’s how much we’re willing to change before it does.
We can already see the apartment listings now: studio submarine for $10K/month.