High Water Line In Brooklyn

The New York Times has a profile of artist Eve S. Mosher, who is marking chalk lines on the streets and sidewalks of the Spring Creek and Canarsie neighborhoods of Brooklyn:
New York has seen its share of temporary, site specific artworks over the last several decades. This work is intended to make a point:

The chalk demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.
In a worst-case scenario, according to the research, the line could mark the zone for flooding that would occur every eight years, on average, by the year 2050, meaning that dozens of neighborhoods would soon come to resemble Venice, or maybe ancient Alexandria.
Over the next several months, Ms. Mosher, 38, will extend her line through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn and then move on to Manhattan to draw a line that begins at East 14th Street and loops around the bottom of the island, back up to West 14th Street.
Next she will return to Brooklyn and work her way from the Verrazano Bridge to the Battery Tunnel to Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, whose sludgy industrial topography could serve as a wanted poster for the kind of environmental damage that her project, called “High Water Line,” is warning against.

In New York, the damage from rising sea levels would not just be seen on the streets. The city relies on underground infrastructure such as water, sewer, power, communications and of course subways. If conceptual art is intended to provoke thought, Ms. Mosher is succeeding.
Photo: Kitra Cahana/The New York Times