Windmills may be there, too, he said, because the shrinking coastline is only the most obvious of the many ways in which rising sea level is transforming Long Island. As in Holland, the rising ocean waters also are pushing up the underground water table, flooding formerly dry areas. Some scientists think the water table may be rising even faster than sea level. When sea level rises, the salt water compresses the bubble from below and from all sides, forcing the fresh water upward even faster than the rising sea. Of course, none of these changes is happening overnight, and there are other complicating factors.
Heavy rains raise the water table, and heavy pumping by water wells lowers it.
The land isn't stable, either. Various parts of Long Island are still slowly rising or falling, in a residual effect of the last glacier. That ice sheet was so heavy that it temporarily distorted the Earth's crust, which is still gradually returning to its former shape 1000 generations after the glacier receded north. Nor has the 20,000-year trend of warmer weather and higher seas been a steady rise. Almost all of the increase came during the first 14,000 years.