Adding to the new tools visualizing the impacts of climate change is this -- Sea Level Rise Explorer, an interactive map showing the land capture by potential long-term sea level rise around the world. The map, developed by Global Warming Art, and powered by Google Maps, uses a colored palette to show which areas will be affected by a rise between -10 and +70 meters.

It's long been a joke of those with an interest in real estate and a concern for climate change that now's the time to swap your beach house for a mountain cabin. For most areas, this is an exaggeration -- insurance premiums will rise faster than sea levels. For other areas, however, the threat is far more real.

Consider that the extent of the effected land is highly variable. In some areas, large swaths of land are at long-term risk of a rising sea. On the map, it's like the red watercolor pigment has organically bled out and into the surrounding canvas. Other coastal areas are hardly affected.

Take my home town of Falmouth, Maine, for instance. As a suburb of Portland, with communities built up to the waters edge and a down town with salt water exposure on three sides, it seems perfectly poised for high-risk exposure to rising sea levels.

And indeed it is. Portland is the geen patch in the center surrounded by red, indicating land potentiallty captured by a rising sea.

And yet, drive a few minutes north into the upper right hand corner of the picture, and the house I grew up sits rests safely in a sea of green. Because of the steep rise from my house -- about 5 or 6 city blocks from the water front -- to the pier where we moor our boat, the band of red is fairly thin. For my house to be directly affected, according to this map, it would require a 20 meter sea level rise. That's a lot -- and a long way off, if at all.

How long, exactly? Over the last century, the sea level has been rising by about 1.8mm per year. Between 1993 and 2003, that rate was estimated to be closer to somewhere between 2.8 and 3.1. At a constant rate of 3 mm -- a very high estimate -- it would take more than more 6,500 years for the Atlantic to lap at my doorstep.  

More recent forecasts have been more dire. Early in March, a team of scientists came out with a paper arguing that melting ice sheets in Greeland and Antarctica are likely to raise levels by a meter or more by 2100. This predictions is much faster than the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report released two years ago in which they presented a worse-case scenario of 59cm sea level rise by 2100.

If the newer finding is correct, 600 millions people are likely to be displaced from the coastal cities, deltas, low-lying areas and small island states they call home. George Black wrote a wonderful cover story for On Earth about Bangladesh a few months ago. According to an article in The Independent, "Experts in Bangladesh estimate that a one-metre rise in sea levels would swamp 17 per cent of the country's land mass. Pacific islands such as Tuvalu, where 12,000 people live just a few feet above sea level, and the Maldives, would face complete obliteration."

These figures are stunning. But they are hard to imagine.

We think of the world as the map we know. And while the collapse of the Soviet Union, and other military claims, has made us familiar with redrawing the boundaries of nation states, we're not familiar with erasing them entirely. We've been taught to color within the lines, but not think without them.

This, in part, is the value of the Sea Level Rise Explorer. The red swaths convey the message stats and predictions can't -- these are long-term danger areas, if they continue to be land areas at all.

Check out Florida, New Orleans and the Bahamas.

Bangladesh -- home to 150 million people.

The North Sea.

There are lots of other places around the globe, too. See the "Selected Locations" tab in the upper right corner for highlights of the areas most affected.

Now, you don't have to imagine. It's there, all too clearly, in technicolor.