This seems like a fun map for an rpg campaign

[james_davis_nicoll]

Comments

[mindstalk]

What's it from? Or what does it show?

[jamoche]

San Francisco Bay Area after the ocean rises.

[theresawright]

If the region did flood over all those towns and cities, how long would it take for the waters to be clean? I'm thinking of abandoned gas stations, industrial sites, rotting old buildings, asphalt surfaces...

[brooksmoses]

...and all of the Superfund sites around here from when "Silicon Valley" meant there was a startup chipmaker on every block, with all the delightful chemicals (and budget for proper disposal of same) that that implies. About 2% of the Superfund sites in the U.S. are under the water on that map.

[voidampersand]

Silicon Valley has lots of Superfund sites but it's not all about the silicon, and the nastiest stuff is older.

The Superfund site in my neighborhood is the former ag supply business. Thy sold pesticides to the local farmers, and were not careful about cleanup. There is a thick layer of clay over the old ground and houses on top now. Disturb it at your peril.

On the other side of town where a semiconductor plant used to be, they have a little fenced off well and a pump spraying water in the air. The contaminants evaporate out and blow away. Eventually the groundwater will be clean again.

[cynthia1960]

Interestingly enough, there is now housing where I used to work in Sunnyvale. It was part of a Superfund site, and the remediation started way back even before I started at AMD in '82. I was a safety coordinator for my department, and heard about the remediation as part of the task.

[gatunian]

Don't forget all that radium on Treasure Island!

[roseembolism]

Assuming industrial civilization is gone, the area along the Sacramento river would probably still have enough currents to sweep stuff down to the ocean. The broad flat inland oceans would probably within a few decades have enough of a layer of silly built up that the water would mostly be OK...unless something dredged up the bottom...

[rezendi]

Second fun fact: debris from the mining explosives of the 1849ers up in the Sierra foothills is just now making its way through the San Francisco Bay, courtesy of the slow but inexorable river currents. (source: I attended a "DredgeFest" expedition a couple years ago.)

[ritaxis]

My house is gone in the picture.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I think my grandparents house on San Carlos Drive survives.

[ba_munronoe]

So you're saying you can't see your house from here?

[cynthia1960]

My guess is that my place in downtown SJ is gone.

[graydon]

tech level? Are we talking, alternate earth where there was never major construction there, and everybody's just moved uphill a bit? Someone trying to scavenge copper from increasingly deep water? Alien archeologists? Slow resumption of trade in wooden sailing vessels?

[ba_munronoe]

Parts of the Central Valley near the bay are _already_ below sea level: I wonder how big an earthquake it would take to open up a channel?

[arethinn]

I don't think that's possible with the transverse faults we have here because the Pacific plate is moving northward relative to the North American plate, carrying some extreme coastal bits of land with it. Point Reyes will be in Alaska someday, though.

[ariaflame]

Have you heard of Callisto 6?

[kedamono]

Then there is Isla de California, where California is an island. And depending on the sources, it's either an island up to San Francisco, or according to the Spanish explorer Juan de Fuca, an island all the way up to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Now imagine what sort of adventures you'd have there...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_California

[arethinn]

We are nnnooootttt quite underwater? I think? It's hard to see at 427x469.

[voidampersand]

See also the Inland Sea map at Kesh Maps.

[rezendi]

Fun fact: much of the Sacramento Delta is already dozens of feet below sea level.

[beamjockey]

1. Is there an obvious place to build a dam of not-unreasonable dimensions?

2. Does there exist an RPG about dam-building?

[rezendi]

Unfortunately dams in areas prone to massive earthquakes are problematic.

[beamjockey]

As you can already tell, I know dam-all about this subject.

[theresawright]

As is built land, but that doesn't stop people from trying. I could see people trying a combination of dams and raised earthworks to save valuable communities or farmland from rising waters. How well it would work depends on your faith in the US Army Corps of Engineers, but catastrophic failure could make for an interesting disaster novel.

[chrysostom]

Salton Sea but much bigger.

[(Anonymous)]

Buried somewhere in my book collection is a novel called The Wave, in which a landslip into a Canadian dam's reservoir raises a 600ft wave that destroys the dam and heads downstream. Oh, and of course there's a nuclear power plant in its path, just in case the wave wasn't going to do enough damage on its own.

Paul Clarke

[felila]

Unless they are natural dams! Built by beavers. Small dams all the way down the streams flowing into the big rivers. Trap silt, fill up, beavers move, build dam ...

[anzha]

You should try the Amazon Basin with heightened sea levels.

http://flood.firetree.net/

Set to 60m.

[elf]

Looks like I can stay put; even at +7m, my home's not underwater (well, not the upper story), and at 9m, I'll just have to set up camp a parking lot in the next block.

...living on a 50x100m asphalt island is sustainable, right?

[ba_munronoe]

Here in Albuquerque at 4900 feet elevation, I snigger at you lowlanders.

(Admittedly, one of those 30 year droughts could be troublesome).