New Delhi, Delhi, India

Rising ocean levels could trigger a mass movement that would compel more than 13 million individuals living along the beachfront zones of the United States to migrate inland by 2100, according to a study by The University of Southern California scholars.

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The research published in the magazine PLOS ONE this week found the effect of rising seas will swell the nation over, past seaside regions in danger of flooding, as influenced individuals move inland.

Sea-level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of seawater as it warms.

Within just a few decades, hundreds of thousands of homes on the US coast will be flooded.

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In fact, by the end of the century, six feet of ocean-level rise would redraw the coastline of southern Florida, parts of North Carolina and Virginia and most of Boston and New Orleans.

(With inputs from agencies)