These interactive maps show North America's Pacific Coast after the ice caps have melted

Remember Jeffrey Linn’s beautiful and terrifying maps of what sea level rises could do to the Pacific Coast of the US? The Islands of Portland, and so forth?

If you don’t, you clearly haven’t listened to this week’s podcast, on which we talked about it at some length. Honestly, you should really get to that. Go on. Do it now. We’ll look at this map of post-apocalyptic Seattle until you’ve finished.

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn.

Done it? Great!

So, anyway, following the podcast Jeffrey got in touch to let us know he’d updated his maps. Now, with a little help from CartoDB, there’s an interactive version, showing what the West Coast would look like if the ice sheets all melted, triggering a 66m sea level rise.

The maps only show North America’s Pacific Coast: we can’t use them to tour the aquatic ruins of London or Hong Kong (alas). But they do give you a sense of quite what A Bad Thing the collapse of those ice sheets would be.

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Here’s Seattle again:

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

In case you don’t know the city very well, we’ve zoomed in on the downtown. Here’s the space needle:

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

That’s 184m tall, though, so it’ll still be visible above the waves.

Here’s Vancouver:

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

The central business district has seen drier days:

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

And you think San Francisco has a housing crisis now? Imagine what it’ll be like once this has happened:

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

Much of Los Angeles has now gone but, on the upside, the city centre is now much more convenient for the beach.

Click to expand. Image: Jeffrey Linn/CartoDB.

You can play with Linn’s maps here. And while you’re mucking about on the internet, if you wanted to subscribe to our podcast and leave a nice review on iTunes, you’d not only been helping CityMetric in its campaign for world domination, we’d also love you forever. Thanks.

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