It’s officially king tide season in the San Francisco Bay Area, meaning unusually high tides and worrying floods will inundate SF and elsewhere on some days until the New Year.
Data points and lofty statistics have their individual merits — but they’re hard to comprehend; to grasp with a familiar language. In our collective lexicons, we humans struggle to hold ideologies and models that lack familiarity. If we can’t see our own experiences in a certain reality presented to us, we tend to fumble on the lessons that could be learned from understanding those truths. (It’s this very reason why Getty Images Photographer Justin Sullivan has dedicated much of his nearly two-decades-long career with the media company to documenting the now-described climate crisis in jaw-dropping stills.)
This past weekend, San Franciscans managed to see—in real-time—what the city could look like in a future defined by the climate crisis. thanks to a phenomenon known as king tides — a twice-a-year natural phenomenon that sees major tidal swings sometimes measuring two or more feet higher than normal. For the City By The Bay, it’s a glimpse into a reality surrounded by an ever-encroaching sea that was on display November 15th through 17th and will be again December 13th through 15th.
“We took the kids out for some ‘outside time’ today, but we forgot about the king tides coming in this weekend,” said Annie Shoberge, a mom of two young boys, to Underscore on Saturday, November 16th. The thirty-something mother was one of a half-dozen or so people glued to the swelling tide crashing along the Embarcadero. Conversely, during low tides, an abundance of tide pools pop up along other parts of the SF Bay Area and offer wildlife watchers and biologists windows into a marine world otherwise inaccessible to them.
“It’s kind of scary when you actually think about how fragile San Francisco is to sea rise,” Shoberge replied when asked how she felt about the tides mirroring a time when this shoreline level could be normal. “We live in Nob Hill, but thinking that I could have a water-side properly before we pay off our mortgage is kind of wild.”
Wild, sure. Improbable? Not exactly.
As SFGate editor Andrew Chamming wrote in 2016, a 25’ sea rise would effectively wipe out the Embarcadero and much of Bayview-Hunters Point, the Mission District, and the Marina District could disappear into the San Francisco Bay in a century. Though that severity of sea-level rise won’t come our way by 2050, the next three decades might see the San Francisco Bay swell by up nearly two feet — a figure that could more than triple by the end of the century. Because of this looming climate catastrophe, the SF Port Commission released a report saying the City will need to raise parts of the Embarcadero by some 6 feet to avoid the worst of the flooding, per KQED.
As a species, we simply won’t survive the worst of the climate crisis: a San Francisco drowning from rising sea levels, set inside a world that’s 35 degrees Fahrenheit warmer because of human activity.
