Photo courtesy of the National Guard via Flickr. Southern U.S. states have faced increased flooding due to sea level rise caused by climate change.
By Diksha Batra ’26
Staff Writer
Warming temperatures have been affecting people in the South more than the rest of America. According to Mississippi Today, the Climate Change Risk Index for the South is 229. In contrast, the Northeast has an index of 123, the Midwest index is 147 and the West has an index of 166.
A recent study covered by The Washington Post found that the Southeast coast and the Gulf Coast have experienced a “rate of sea level rise since 2010 at over 10 millimeters — or one centimeter — per year in the region.” In comparison to the rest of the world, the rate is “more than double the global average rate of about 4.5 millimeters per year since 2010.” Damage caused by hurricanes was made worse by sea level rise, as was seen with Hurricanes Michael and Ian. “The water level associated with Hurricane Ian was the highest on record due to the combined effect of sea level rise and storm surge,” The Washington Post reported.
Not only are sea levels rising in the Gulf of Mexico, but temperatures in the region are rising faster than in the rest of the world. Zhankun Wang, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Texas Public Radio that “the Gulf of Mexico is just one of the areas that has a faster warming than the global ocean and twice the global rate is still in a reasonable range.” He explained that the cause behind increasing temperatures is that “the loop current and the loop current eddies actually direct a huge amount of heat from the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico. And because of the general tropical structure of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of heat is starting to get inside it, causing the warming.” He also explained that one of the factors behind rising sea levels is thermal expansion. Thermal expansion, according to NASA, “happens when water gets warmer, which causes the volume of the water to increase.” They also point out that “half of the measured global sea level rise on Earth is from warming waters and thermal expansion.”
Madeleine Broussard ’26, a Texas resident, faced devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “I was in eighth grade, and I was just about to start school,” Broussard said. She was sleeping, and at 4 a.m. her father woke her up to “move everything to a high place.” However, that was not enough and soon “a church member had to come with his truck” to rescue them. She remembers putting her “dog in a suitcase so he did not have to be on the ground.”
After Hurricane Harvey, Broussard had to live in her church for a couple of weeks because her house was flooded with 1 foot of water. She had lost a lot of possessions such as childhood toys, and she “felt very sad after that.” It took her family about two years to financially recover from the storm.
Broussard remembers her community being devastated by Hurricane Harvey. She said she “could not go to school for a long time because the schools flooded” and many people “were displaced.” Many children lost their school supplies and clothes in the flood. She describes the situation as being “like a domino effect.”
Broussard pointed out “how powerful a community can be in helping each other.” During the hurricane, “people were out on boats in the middle of neighborhoods saving people during the thick of the hurricane.” According to Broussard, many people who otherwise would have drowned or been trapped inside their houses were saved by strangers. After the hurricane, she recalls that “Chick-fil-A in our city sent a bunch of sandwiches [to be distributed to community members],” while “people were donating clothes” and the schools helped by getting supplies out to those in need.
Broussard described her experience with Hurricane Harvey as “an example of being affected by global warming,” because while her house never got flooded again, homes in more coastal cities have faced further flooding. Broussard lives about an hour away from the coastline, but said, “Galveston, which is a coastal city, was really deeply affected.”
A couple of years later, Broussard’s family was affected by another hurricane. “It was in 2020 Hurricane Laura, which devastated my family really badly and they live in a smallish town,” Broussard explained. This time her family was affected in Louisiana. Some of the permanent effects, Broussard explained, were that “a lot of businesses closed permanently.”
The main reason behind global warming is corporations, according to Broussard. “I think it’s up to the government,” she said. She urged people to “call on our government.”
“We have to write to our senator, write to our local officials, we need to put restrictions on companies,” she said. She emphasized that this is necessary “to help people because so many things are affected by hurricanes.”