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JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—For most of his life, Steve Salem has lived an existence closely tied to the rise and fall of the tides.
Salem is a 50-year-old captain who designed and built his 65-foot vessel by hand.
“Noah and I are related in some way,” said Salem, 75, whose silver beard is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway.
Salem knows how the sun and moon affect the tides and has a natural sense of the ebb and flow of the tides. Yet here the tides begin to test even his intuition.
He and his wife live in a rust-colored ranch house on a tributary of the St. Johns River, Florida’s longest river. Before they moved in, the house flooded in 2017 when Hurricane Irma swept through. It flooded again in 2022 when Hurricane Nicole defied his expectations. But Salem believes the house is sturdy and that he can ride out the tides, as he always has.
“I'm a water dog to begin with. I've always been on the water,” said Salem, who prefers to be called Captain Steve. “I worry about things that I need to do something about. If I can't do anything about it, what's going to happen if I worry about it?”
In the American South, the water level is rising at an accelerating pace, making it one of the most extreme on Earth. This wave has baffled scientists like Jeff Chanton, a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Florida State University.
“It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would think it would gradually increase, it would be a gradual thing. But this is a big change.”
Global sea levels have risen about 1.5 millimeters per year since 1900, a rate not seen in at least 3,000 years, generally attributed to melting ice sheets and glaciers, as well as the expansion of the oceans as their temperatures rise. The rate has increased since the mid-20th century, with more than 3 millimeters per year since 1992.
In the south, the rate has accelerated further, from about 1.7 millimeters per year in the early 20th century to at least 8.4 millimeters in 2021, according to a 2023 study published in Nature Communications based on tide gauge data from across the region. In Pensacola, a beach community on the western side of the Florida Panhandle, the rate increased to about 11 millimeters per year in late 2021.
“I think people just really have no idea what's coming, because we don't have a way to visualize it through our own personal experiences, or the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It's not something where you say, 'I know what that might look like because I've seen it.' Because we don't.
“It's the same everywhere from North Carolina to the Florida Keys and all the way down to Alabama,” he said. “All of these areas are extremely vulnerable.”
The acceleration is expected to amplify the effects of hurricane-force winds, disruptive flooding and land loss. In recent years, rising tides have coincided with record-breaking hurricane seasons, pushing storm surges higher and farther inland. In 2022, Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwest Florida, was the costliest hurricane in the state’s history and the third costliest to hit the United States to date, after Katrina in 2005 and Harvey in 2017.
“It doesn't even take a big storm anymore. You just get these compounding effects,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “All of a sudden you have a much more impactful flood event, and a lot of the infrastructure, frankly, like the stormwater infrastructure, just wasn't built to handle this.”
