#southern US

[mapsontheweb]

An Alabamian's Take on What's Southern

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

Have you done the Mediterranean house gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus)?

Not yet! I love these little guys.

[marzipanandminutiae]

being a Tennessee teenager means, at least once, waking up to the sirens at 2:30 on a school night when you have to get up at 5:30 for school, and briefly considering whether death by tornado really WOULD be worse than AP English class on 4 hours of sleep

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Across the American South, tides are rising at accelerating rates that are among the most extreme on Earth, constituting a surge that has startled scientists such as Jeff Chanton, professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University.

“It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would think it would increase gradually, it would be a gradual thing. But this is like a major shift.”

Worldwide sea levels have climbed since 1900 by some 1.5 millimeters a year, a pace that is unprecedented in at least 3,000 years and generally attributable to melting ice sheets and glaciers and also the expansion of the oceans as their temperatures warm. Since the middle of the 20th century the rate has gained speed, exceeding 3 millimeters a year since 1992.

In the South the pace has quickened further, jumping from about 1.7 millimeters a year at the turn of the 20th century to at least 8.4 millimeters by 2021, according to a 2023 study published in Nature Communications based on tidal gauge records from throughout the region. In Pensacola, a beachy community on the western side of the Florida Panhandle, the rate soared to roughly 11 millimeters a year by the end of 2021. 

“I think people just really have no idea what is coming, because we have no way of visualizing that through our own personal experiences, or that of the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not something where you go, ‘I know what that might look like because I’ve seen that.’ Because we haven’t.

“It’s the same everywhere, from North Carolina all the way down to the Florida Keys and all the way up into Alabama,” he said. “All of these areas are extremely vulnerable.”

The acceleration is poised to amplify impacts such as hurricane storm surges, nuisance flooding and land loss. In recent years the rising tides have coincided with record-breaking hurricane seasons, pushing storm surges higher and farther inland. In 2022 Hurricane Ian, which came ashore in southwest Florida, was the costliest hurricane in state history and third-costliest to date in the United States, after Katrina in 2005 and Harvey in 2017.

“It doesn’t even take a major storm event anymore. You just get these compounding effects,” said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “All of a sudden you have a much more impactful flooding event, and a lot of the infrastructure, frankly, like the stormwater infrastructure, it’s just not built for this.”

[ange111diary]

when’s it gonna be my turn?

[heartshapedcaskett]

Laurinburg, North Carolina

[weaver-z]

The way people who have lived in huge city centers in northern states treat minorities in southern states is atrocious. You condescend to us about just voting harder, you ignore us when we talk about issues that affect us, you use language that actively alienates people who grew up in places where so-called "widely accepted" slurs were commonly used. So many people on this site and the wider internet think it's funny to start blindly mocking people for "voting for" the things politicians do to us, regardless of our actual political affiliation and activity. Stop treating gerrymandered-to-hell red states like a monolith or treating us like children who have no idea how electoral politics work. We're sick of y'all.

[alethianightsong]

If my body is a temple to God...

then God's that rich a-hole with a billion private homes who refuses to let anyone stay in them. He also gets mad when the people who maintain these houses decide to do some superficial decorating cuz it's fun. "Who put liquor in my house?" "But God, you weren't even here, and I didn't even get drunk, just buzzed." "I don't care, I'm punishing you once this temple decays."

[brettdoesdiscourse]

I think people overlook southern kindness too much. Because the fact is, as bad of a reputation as the south gets, it's full of so many people willing to be ridiculously kind to strangers.

Like the 70 year old man who stopped and offered to help me pick eight dollars worth of change up after I dropped my bag in the middle of a Walmart. My mom who never lets anyone be hungry in her house and always sends them home with enough food to feed their family. The 20 something year old boys who inspected my sister's car to make sure it was okay to drive after she rear-ended them.

The middle-aged woman who stopped to see if me and my brother were okay when my car broke down then drove us to the auto shop and back so we wouldn't have to walk in the cold. The ten year old boys who offered to carry heavy bags out to ladies' cars for them. The people who always donate free food and books to our pantries, despite the fact we live in an impoverished city where they didn't have a lot either.

[dailystreetsnapshots]

Savannah, Georgia, USA

[feralgirlfromatl]

For the love of southern architecture

[thingsifoundongeoguessr]

You'd better pay up these guys already took Texas' panhandle (??)

[mahgnib]

World’s creepiest fish, the sheepshead, with human-looking teeth, found (and eaten) in the coastal waters off the Southern US.

[runs-4-pinkcupcakes]

Midnight. Moon somewhere over an East Coast Beach. USA. May 2023. I missed you. 💋

📸: runs-4-pinkcupcakes

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Lloyd Branson (American, 1861-1925) Portrait of The Artist’s Niece, Susan Williams Branson (1892-1901) of Tennessee, n.d.

[killrisma]

(reblog to increase sample size)