A study published Monday finds sea-level rise along the coast of the southeastern United States has accelerated rapidly since 2010, raising fears that tens of millions of Americans’ homes in cities across the South will be at risk from flooding in the decades to come.

“It’s a window into the future,” Sönke Dangendorf, an assistant professor of river-coastal science and engineering at Tulane University, who co-authored the study that appeared in Nature Communications, told the Washington Post.

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That paper and another published last month in the Journal of Climate find that sea levels along the Gulf Coast and the southern Atlantic Coast have risen an average of 1 centimeter per year since 2010. That translates to nearly 5 inches over the last 12 years, and it is about double the rate of average global sea-level rise during the same time period.

Read more: yahoo