Many Major Airports Are Near Sea Level. A Disaster in Japan Shows What Can Go Wrong.

This was weather, not climate, and had to be a known risk at the time the airport was built. It has nothing to do with climate change. Nothing.

How are you comparing Rome,New York and Shanghai to this man made Island? Global warming has nothing to do with this. This case is purely due to bad construction and bad calculations. Stop blaming global warming for everything.

What a huge, and horrifyingly exact example of ~ A: Global Warming, and B: (big shocker) don't build in a Flood Plain inland, or on a Coast prone to damaging storms. If anyone doubts that the Earth is in a serious Climate Shift, the picture of Kansai Airport tells you everything you need to know. The now-broken, and still-polluting-lethal-radiation Fukushima Nuclear Reactor tells you even more about it. Architecture and Engineering won't save anyone from a storm that big. If Global Warming is not seriously addressed by the entire World, NOW, this will only be the tip of the iceberg. Get real. Here it comes.

This article would be better if the Times front-loaded the fact KIX is on a man-made, sinking island. I’ve been there in “normal” rain and the ramp and runways had giant (not deep) lakes. There’s always been climate change. There have been no less than 5 recorded ice ages. The pyramids in Egypt were built along the Nile in a verdant flood plain... Change? Of course! As for SFO, AMS, LGA, etc. Please! SFO is landfill. We re-pave the ramp where 747s and A380s park (frequently) because they’re heavy. LGA is built on a former dump.... Is SFO underwater, as Gore (who used to have a condo here) told us would happen by 2018? No. Why would he buy here if SF was going to be under water? Is the Sydney Opera House under water yet?

You can write off those low-lying airports now. They're doomed. It's time to undertake all kinds of urgent measures before climate change so disrupts society that we can't marshal the resources. The single most urgent is to shut down and decommission every nuclear power plant. Coastal ones will be flooded, while river-sited ones will not be coolable as water temps rise and flow rates diminish or become erratic. All these plants are Fukushimas waiting to happen, and they all store on site vast troves of "spent" fuel which is still radioactive. It all needs to move post-haste into dry cask storage.

Honolulu airport is only about 13 fear above sea level.

Holy moly! I landed on that airport a lot. It was known that they had not got the pilings far enough down on the first part and it was already slowly sinking. There was a plan to build a mirror image of it, with deeper pilings, on the other side of this first attempt. Probably has more urgency to it now. . .

"Engineers had expected the island to sink, on average, less than a foot a year over 50 years after the start of construction as the seabed settled under the airport’s weight. But the island sank more than 30 feet in its first seven years and has continued to descend, now losing 43 feet in elevation at the last measurement." So, where does "global warming" come in? They've got a subsidence problem. If you're claiming sea level rise is also a problem then state facts.

I was due to fly back to JFK from Nice, France (the airport sits right on the bay) more than 20 years ago when the Nice area was hit by a "storm of the century" that sent torrents of water down from the hills, crossing a superhighway and totally flooding and knocking out power at the airport for days, with hundreds of cars in underground parking destroyed. We were delayed by two days, but we did get out (we were on Delta), though at the time we left the airport was still without all but essential power (runway lights & low lights in terminal, but no working computers, escalators, elevators, cash registers, jetways, etc.). However, at the time we left many more airlines were still not operating, so we were grateful to get out. I was flying back to NYC from Italy in the aftermath of Sandy and we (United) were able to land at EWR, I think two days after the storm. I believe the storm was on a Monday night into Tuesday, and we were able to return, as scheduled, on the Thursday, though the plane was 7 or 8 hours late arriving from the US (I thought it was coming in from midwest, but I could be wrong). I wasn't aware until I read this article that there had been a lot of flooding on the runways at EWR.

My heart goes out to the Japanese. That's a difficult country to survive in. Climate change will hurt the most vulnerable first. But it won't leave the rest of us out; in the end we will find life entirely changed, as extremes increase and people refuse to do sensible things because they are set to make a lot of money or set in their ways. I just finished Jeff Goodell's fine bestseller "The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World" which is a range of realistic cautionary tales. Would that we could work together to solve problems, rather than hating on those who study and inform and warn and embracing reassuring lies or fictions.

Between 1995 and 2003, I flew in/out of Kansai (KIX) 28 times. It had just opened and it was a marvelous airport. Very efficient to get through, and very efficient to get to with a train from the center of Osaka. It was built on a man-made island, but clearly no consideration was given to storm surge or rising sea levels. This is an import lesson for all future airport construction.

Ten years ago, a study showed that the total cost of Kansai Airport was $20 billion - widely criticized as a geotechnical engineering disaster. A quarter century ago, experts warned of the land sink dangers because of the soft soils of Osaka Bay but as in so many other projects, like the nuclear power plants, the government and business ignored warnings and pushed ahead. Other warnings predicted that passenger traffic was too low to assure profits. The airport was a money loser long before this reminder of the arrogance of power.

I wouldn't worry so much about the airports. While they are big, they are is an easy economic case to be made for continuing to fortify them as necessary. If you can build these artificial islands once, you can add some more later on if the sea rises. The rest of these coastal cities is another story. You might have an airport conveniently located next to the flooded ruins of a former city. Not sure who's going to want to fly there!

Then after landing at the fortified walled airport one must take subways or drive through tunnels to get downtown or where ever. These too will also be flooded. It is not just the airports alone that are facing the tides. The newly gentrified Seaport area of Boston was entirely flooded last winter during the storms. It seems redundant to bolster new development in these flood prone areas. For it is only going to become much worse. This is the literal tip of the iceberg. We've known about these coming climate changes for decades and did absolutely nothing about it. So here we are.

Donald and the GOP, it's all a hoax

Ah! for the glory days of the Pan AM Clipper sea planes. They were the answer, as the plane always landed into the wind, and taxied up a ramp to the terminals. May come back again!1

Interesting article. The main issue is the airport is settling, not that sea level is rising. The settlement is a well known topic in the Geotechnical Engineering community. To say the settlement predictions were "a little off" is being kind. The new Hong Kong airport is also an island with very different subsurface conditions so no settlement issues. That the airport got back to service with relatively little damage is a credit to the designers. Given the magnitude of weather issues Japan has had overall this was a minor damage to a major event. There is a point were it is better to accept some flooding etc and get back in service than to get an 100% safe ( very expensive) solution. Rising sea levels have been going on for 18 thousand years and we have adapted rather well. Schipol Airport , Amsterdam, is not an orphan - but rather the result of a long running campaign in Holland to reclaim land.

From the accompanying photo, it looks like the longer main runway had less silt deposited on it.

Used this airport to go to Kobe for business, it made sense due to the shortage of land to build an airport, but this will happen and I am not sure it was designed correctly Hong Kong is also a harbor facility, but its build into an existing island The US airports have no worries because climate change and rising sea levels do not exist, at least not for Republicans Who will pay the billions to replace these facilities when the time comes?

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam has runways ~10 feet below sea level. It works just fine.

It is disingenuous to list St. Paul, MN airport as a victim of climate change. The airport is a small regional airport that is built on the Mississippi River flood plain. It should never have been built (or improved). The main airport, MSP, and the city of St. Paul are both safely built on higher ground.

LaGuardia has a berm at the end of the runway to keep high tide from flooding it. Kennedy is just a few feet above sea level. It will happen here.

Japan has had such a terrible summer. First record rainfall that lead to multiple mudslides. Then record heat lasting several weeks. Then more Typhoons this season then usual, at one point they were dealing with two at the same time. And now a very large earthquake in Hokkaido. I hope they get a break for all this soon.

Kansai Airport is one of my favorite airports. Designed by Renzo Piano, it is easy to get to and easy to navigate. It’s a joy compared to the horribly mangled Narita, which was, for decades, the only way into Japan in the center of Honshu. Since Haneda has opened to international flights, I try to avoid Narita as much as possible. I hope official and engineers figure out a way to fix KIX once and for all.

I've flown to this airport. It was a marvel of effort and ingenuity at the time. The buildings can be raised on hydraulic jacks as the island sinks. But I don't think there's any way to raise the runways other than adding more rocks, concrete, and sand. I'm sure the risk / benefit projections and pro forma made years ago seemed sound. Now they seem woefully inadequate. Talk about a sunk cost. APPLY that lesson to the coastal development around the world. All the GDPs of all the developed world for the remaining century can't cover the expense of rising sea levels. What kind of crisis happens when there are a billion climate change refugees and the insurance companies are bust and the right wing rule the airwaves of all modern media? In a world where every man must fend for himself, nothing is possible against a global catastrophe. It is high time to suss out libertarians in every suit. The consequence of tax cuts for the rich is an utterly useless ruling class and a destroyed planet. How's that for a reality show? I will take what Japan does to fix KIX as a template of social shared responsibility and expertise. There is no viable libertarian streak in that society. I expect that to mean they will be sending us humanitarian aid before the end of the century.

My wife and I flew out of Kansai on Saturday. We marveled at the Japanese Engineering and Construction to create this airport. Considering the direct hit it took, pretty impressed that they could re-open in a few days. These types of reclaimed spaces to avoid the NIMBY issues will be the only way to build massive things like airports.

Wow! I just realized that this is the solution to the dangerous issue relating to China's construction of "islands" in the South China Sea. Just wait awhile. They'll soon be under water.