California Central Valley

Ursula LeGuin did it first–Always Coming Home has a fantastic drawing of this, created in the mid-1980s.

This map shows what central California and the Bay Area will look like when the ice caps completely melt–66m of sea level rise.

Burrito Justice did a San Francisco version a few years ago. His map inspired much of the work I’ve done with sea rise maps in the past couple of years.

My favorite landforms? Sutter Island and the Isle near Rio Vista. Marin also becomes an island, which makes sense in many ways. Sacramento? Stockton? Lodi? Manteca? Screwed. The historic Tulare Lake re-emerges, but with salt water this time around. Monterey Bay becomes much larger.

I used cross-blended hypsometric tinting to differentiate arid and humid areas, calculated the curvature of the terrain to emphasize the convex with light accents and the concave with dark accents–this really distinguishes the details of the terrain.

The sea rise portions of the map are a combination of Gebco data (along the coast) and EarthEnv data (anything east of the Golden Gate).