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The ‘Atlas of Disappearing Places’ maps out climate impacts around the globe

Fast Company: “In Shanghai, one of the word’s largest megacities, the city center has sunk between 7 and 10 feet in less than a century. As the city has pumped out of aquifers underground, the sheer weight of the buildings has started to compress the earth: The financial district, a former marsh, is now home to at least 3,000 high-rise buildings. As sea levels rise, the network of sea walls and other defenses likely won’t be enough to protect the lowering city from floods. The city is one of 20 places mapped in a new book called the Atlas of Disappearing Places. Artist Christina Conklin created beautiful but disturbing paintings of the impacts in each location with data from scientific papers, using seaweed as a canvas. (If water hits the painted seaweed, each painting will itself disappear.) “We decided to do an art-meets-science book to be more engaging and compelling and tell better stories than sort of the straight pop-science book,” says Conklin, who partnered with Marina Psaros, a climate change planner and educator, to write the book…”

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