Sea-level rise will radically redefine the coastline of the 21st century.”

That’s from a new study that shows rising sea levels could lead to extreme flooding events in some U.S. coastal areas doubling every five years.

The study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports suggests that extreme water levels that are now reached once every 50 years may be exceeded daily along U.S. coastlines before the end of the 21st century.

“We find that the odds of exceeding critical water-level thresholds increases exponentially with sea-level rise, meaning that fixed amounts of sea-level rise of only 1–10 cm in areas with a narrow range of present-day extreme water levels can double the odds of flooding,” the report states. “Combining these growth rates with established sea-level rise projections, we find that the odds of extreme flooding double approximately every five years into the future.”

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Hawaii and the University of Illinois looked at the continuous shift in coastal flooding scenarios using tide gauges combined with data from sea-level rise scenarios to model the rate at which flooding events may increase […]