King tides give sneak peek at sea rise future
Coastal residents around Australia are being asked to photograph coming king tides to illustrate the potential impact of climate change on rising sea levels.
The New South Wales and Tasmanian governments are jointly funding the Witness King Tides Project, which is being run by climate change organisation Green Cross Australia.
On December 14, king tides will hit NSW and parts of the Tasmanian coast.
Other states and territories will have their turn next year.
Green Cross spokeswoman Mara Bun says king tides are not caused by climate change but they show what a warmer future could look like.
"It just so happens that when you look at that visually, it represents what might be the case much more often as our oceans gradually warm and rise and so it's incontrovertible that the ocean is warming and therefore we have a challenge and we've got to wake up to it," she said.
Phil Watson, a principal coastal specialist with the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, says the tide will come close to the upper range of predictions for the average sea level rise.
"That's of the order of 90 to 100 centimetres, then basically that's half of the tidal range at the moment," he said.
"So a king tide today is going to be very close to mean sea level by 2100 if we get that sort of sea level rise."
King tides occur twice a year and are caused by an alignment of the gravitation pull between the Sun and the Moon.