Kristina Hill

It's not just rising sea levels that will inundate the San Francisco Bay and other coastal areas of the U.S. as a consequence of climate change; groundwater levels will also rise. Landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design professor Kristina Hill is a pioneering researcher on rising groundwater levels, and one of her students, landscape architecture and environmental planning student Grace Mitchell Tada, describes Professor Hill's findings in this article. "In a nutshell, as a warming climate raises sea levels, the sea won't only move inland, flooding low-lying land near the shore; it may also push water up from beneath our feet," she says. And, as Professor Hill pointed out on a field trip with her students, the scenarios could include such nightmares as water leaching inside homes, toilets chronically backing up, sewage seeping through manholes, the spread of contaminants buried in the soil, and worse. Civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Stacey highlights another problem: the seawalls erected by local cities to protect against rising sea levels could alter tidal amplification, further raising water levels in the Bay and potentially exacerbating flooding in other areas. For more on Professor Hill's research, see this story at Berkeley News from November, and this video from 2017.