Brian Fagan - The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels

Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the
Secrets of the Oceans

Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind
Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans
Where We Saw a Whale: The Story of Lake Clark National Park, Alaska
The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World

From Stonehenge to Samarkand: An Anthology of Archaeological
Travel Writings (editor)

Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society
Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 13001850
Egypt of the Pharaohs
Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nio and the Fate of Civilizations

Into the Unknown: Solving Ancient Mysteries

From Black Land to Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites
Eyewitness to Discovery: First-Person Accounts of More Than Fifty
of the Worlds Greatest Archaeological Discoveries (editor)
Oxford Companion to Archaeology (editor)

Time Detectives: How Scientists Use Modern Technology to Unravel
the Secrets of the Past
Kingdoms of Jade, Kingdoms of Gold: The Americas Before Columbus

The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World
Ancient North America
The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America

The Adventure of Archaeology
The Aztecs
Clash of Cultures
Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archaeologists, and
Monuments in Mesopotamia
Quest for the Past: Great Discoveries in Archaeology
Elusive Treasure: The Story of Early Archaeologists in the Americas
The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt

To

Atticus Catticus Cattamore Moose

A splendid beast who did everything he could to stop this book
being written by dancing on the keyboard at inopportune moments.
And he never has to worry about sea levels.

Hendrik Hertzberg on Hurricane Sandy,
The New Yorker, November 12, 2012

Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. Originally published in The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission.

(For those who prefer to explore the narrative geographically)

FOR EVERYONE

WESTERN EUROPE

THE MEDITERRANEAN, MESOPOTAMIA, AND THE NILE

SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, CHINA, AND JAPAN

ISLANDS (ALASKA, PACIFIC, AND INDIAN OCEAN)

NORTH AMERICA

Almost all my life, Ive lived by the sea. Ive also sailed thousands of kilometers along ocean coasts and across open water, even crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Some of my earliest memories are of lying awake on an English morning, listening to the rain from a southwesterly gale gusting against my bedroom window. Another early childhood experience sticks in my minda late 1940s vacation on Jersey, part of the Channel Islands, where the tides run fast with a range of over eleven meters at full or new moon. I remember watching the rising tide course over wide sand flats so fast that you almost had to run to keep ahead of the breakersnot that my father would have allowed me to do anything so rash. He was well aware of the power of a wave born by a powerful tidal stream. In later years, I sailed small yachts in northern European waters, where the direction of tidal streams and the height of the ebb and flood determine which direction you sail and when, and where youll anchor. Lying aground on a sandbank at thirty-five degrees is no fun, especially if its the middle of the night and you feel guilty for having misjudged the tide. All these cumulative experiences flooded into my consciousness as I delved into the complex history of rising sea levels over the past fifteen thousand yearssince the Ice Age.

You cannot, of course, compare the experience of feeling your way down narrow channels between sandbanks in a small boat with the phenomenon of rising (or falling) sea levels. Tides rise and fall over short cycles of about six hours. In places like Brittany in northern France or the Channel Islands, the landscape changes dramatically from high tide to low. A deep, wide river at high water becomes a narrow stream flowing between rocks and sandbanks at low. Its almost like sailing in a different world, just as it is when you traverse creeks and twisting waterways in the shallow tidal waters of eastern England, where sandbanks appear and vanish in minutes. The changing sea levels described in these pages are something quite different. Were talking here of gradual, cumulative changes in ocean levels that have risen and fallen for at least 750,000 years and probably much longer. This book is primarily concerned with sea level changes over the past 10,000 years or so and how they have affected humanity.

Think of walking on a sandy beach as the tide is rising. You start at low water as the flood begins. As you walk, you play with the encroaching breakers in bare feet. But, as the hours pass, you find yourself walking farther upslope, often on a much narrower beach. The rise is slow, inexorable, and sure. This is exactly what the gradual sea levels since the end of the Ice Age some fifteen thousand years ago were like, but with one significant difference. There was no ebb. The rise was slow, continual, and cumulative over centuries and millennia, caused by geological processes unfolding thousands of kilometers away.

For the most part, were unaware of rising sea levels, unless we live along a low-lying coastline, where even a small rise can spread water over a wide areaas happened in the Persian Gulf at the end of the Ice Age, and is the case in places like the Ganges River delta in Bangladesh today. Even in densely populated, threatened areas like the Mekong or the Nile deltas, decadal changes are almost imperceptible. The attacking ocean only enters our urgent consciousness when hurricanes like Katrina, or more recently, Sandy, barrel ashore, bringing high winds, torrential rainfall, and catastrophic sea surges that uproot everything before them. Such sea surges have always assaulted low-lying coasts, but it is only within the past 150 years or so that these vulnerable coasts have become crowded with tens of thousands, even millions, of people.

The past fifteen thousand years have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age. When the ice started retreating, sea levels were as much as 221 meters below modern levels. Over the next eleven millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and sometimes rapid starts, reaching near-modern levels by about 4000 B.C.E., nine centuries before the first Egyptian pharaohs ruled the Nile valley. This sweeping summary masks a long and complex process of sea level rise, triggered by melting ice sheets, complex earth movements, and myriad local adjustments that are still little understood. By all accounts, these rapid sea level changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because they were able to adjust readily to new coastlines. Over these eleven thousand years, the worlds population was minuscule by todays standards. Fewer than five million people lived on earth fifteen thousand years ago, almost all of them in the Old World. The global population numbered about seven million by six thousand years ago. By todays standards, the world was almost deserted. There was plenty of room to move away from encroaching breakers even in the most densely populated areas. But the marshes and wetlands that protected coasts from storms were still vitally important, not only as natural defenses against the ocean, but also as rich habitats for game, large and small, and also for birds, fish, mollusks, and plant foods.