Chinese audiences might have been delighted to see the People’s Liberation Army suddenly save the day in the disaster movie 2012, but the threat of global warming won’t be resolved so easily. With the majority of China’s wealth and development located along its coastline, rising sea levels could have disastrous consequences for the country.

New maps show what would happen to some of the country’s largest cities in a worse-case scenario. The TL;DR version is this: 43 percent of China’s population would find itself underwater.

The maps below were created by Jeffrey Linn and first published on ChinaFile. The comparisons between what the cities look like today and what could happen to them are stark. Linn created them as a glimpse into what would happen if the polar ice caps completely melted, a cataclysm that would require centuries to take place. But sea levels are rising fast, and these images are alarming. Take a look.

Here’s Hong Kong’s current photo, with the forecast underneath:

This is the before and after of the Pearl River Delta, a place that already suffers from extreme flooding:

And here’s Shanghai: