Project co-leader and Victoria University of Wellington earth sciences Prof Tim Naish said the website went live at 5am yesterday, and soon afterwards started getting 10,000 hits per second which "just killed" the website.
Staff spent the day trying to get the website back up and running.
"The guess is that these are anti-climate change people or the Russians, who knows?
"We don’t know for sure, but we think they’re using an auto bot. They’re coming from an overseas IP address.
"It’s just hitting us with thousands of hits and our website can’t cope."
He said it was frustrating because there was a lot of interest in the website from nationwide media, and local government officials were being asked to comment on the website but were unable to because it was inaccessible.
It was also frustrating for residents interested in what was going to happen on their own land.
The NZ SeaRise website (www.searise.nz/maps) shows location-specific sea level rise projections to the year 2300, for every 2km of the coast of New Zealand.
Climate change and warming temperatures are causing sea levels to rise by 3.5mm a year on average, but until now, the levels did not take into account local vertical land movements.
Prof Naish said continuous small and large seismic events added up to cause subsidence in many parts of New Zealand, and new projections showed the annual rate of sea level rise could double.
Project co-leader and GNS Science Associate Professor Richard Levy said the team had combined vertical land movement and climate-driven sea level rise to provide local sea level projections.
“Property owners, councils, infrastructure providers and others need to know how sea level will change in the coming decades so that they can consider how risks associated with flooding, erosion and rising groundwater will shift."
Ground in Dunedin and Invercargill was quite stable and the cities were unlikely to be any closer to sea inundation than had already been predicted.
However, other parts of the Otago and Southland coastline might be affected.
Details of the affected areas will be published tomorrow.
