If we don’t do anything, we will all be overweight and floating in water, pecked at by seagulls who’ve leveraged the new conditions to wrestle control of most major American cities from our decaying, decrepit species—or at least that’s the takeaway from two things on the Internet today.
Over at The Atlantic, James Hamblin put together this graphic of the country’s obesity rates as they progressed—maybe regressed is the better word?—from 1990 to 2010. As you can see in the key, the darker-blue and then redder things get, the more obese an area has become.
So, plummeting health! But also: rising tides! A recent New York Times post visualizes various sea-level-rise rates—from five to 15 to 25 feet—with two-dimensional maps. Unless widespread changes are made, the takeaway here is that large portions of Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., will be under water in 100 to 300 years. Nickolay Lamm, at Storagefront.com, created some photographs that show what things will look like once the ocean overtakes us. They’re fascinating. Max Read at Gawker GIF’d together (sorry) the photos Lamm made for the D.C. area. You can see his creation below.
Back in September, the BBC asked: “Why are there so many seagulls in cities?“
You’re welcome, BBC.
