The land down under going under

Now this is something weird... It's what Oz would look like if seas were to rise 300 metres due to global warming. Yikes, my home town is well and truly drowned, as is Sydney and a lot of my favourite places.

I find it rather telling to see something like this and realise that this could be where we're heading if the global warming trend doesn't slow down/stop. It might not be in my lifetime but it would be in someone's lifetime. Not a nice thought... especially given that the whole earth would experience similar drownings of the land. What would this mean for all the people in the world at that time? Where would they fit? It'd be pretty crowded, I guess.

The land down under going under - National - smh.com.au

IT IS Australia as we have never seen it before - a dry brown land transformed into an archipelago of disparate islands.

The six images, a fusion of art and science, portray what would happen if sea levels rose by up to 500 metres and the waters inundated the lower-lying regions.

The series is part of an exhibition, Australia from Space, created by a US geographer, Stephen Young, based on images of the continent captured by astronauts and orbiting satellites.

Professor Young, of Salem State College, near Boston, said remote sensing could now reveal extraordinary details about the land, oceans, atmosphere, ice caps and cities.

The starting point of his vision of Australia gradually disappearing was radar information from the space shuttle. Using the map of the rise and fall of the landscape this provided, he calculated how the continent would appear after each additional sea level rise of 100 metres. During the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, sea levels were 100 metres lower than today.

Extreme global warming might eventually lead to another rise of 100 metres, he said. "And on a longer geological time scale the indundations shown are not out of the realm of possibility."

But his intention in producing the set of images - one of 80 in the exhibition - was not to warn of the dangers of climate change. "The piece was created purely for the beauty of seeing Australia in a different way."

Professor Young began using satellite imagery for his research on changes in vegetation more than a decade ago. "I would often come across truly awe-inspiring images of the Earth."

He hung some on his office walls, and found they were very popular with students. Since 1998 his images of landforms, weather patterns, pollution, oceans and bushfires have been shown in galleries around the world to try to inspire "a sense of wonder and curiosity" about the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last report predicted sea levels would rise by between nine centimetres and 88 centimetres by 2100.

The two-day exhibition, a collaboration with the NSW Geographical Society, opens today at the University of NSW.