discussion

“AFTER THE HURRICANE hit Miami in 2037, a foot of sand covered the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage came not from the hurricane’s 175-mile-an-hour winds, but from the twenty-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, historic Art Deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A seventeen-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than three hundred people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; thirteen people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread—falsely, it turned “out—that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant twenty-four miles south of Miami, had been heavily damaged by the surge and had sent a radioactive cloud floating over the city.

The president, of course, said that Miami would be back, that Americans did not give up, that the city would be rebuilt better and stronger than it had been before. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end of Miami as a booming twenty-first-century city.”

“The president, of course, said that Miami would be back, that Americans did not give up, that the city would be rebuilt better and stronger than it had been before. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end of Miami as a booming twenty-first-century city.

All big hurricanes are disastrous. But this one was unexpectedly bad. With sea levels more than a foot higher than they’d been at the dawn of the century, much of South Florida was wet and vulnerable even before the storm hit. Because of the higher water, the storm surge pushed deeper into the region than anyone had imagined it could, flowing up drainage canals and flooding homes and strip malls several miles from the coast. Despite newly elevated runways, “ Miami International Airport was shut down for ten days. Salt water shorted out underground electrical wiring, leaving parts of Miami-Dade County dark for weeks and contaminated municipal drinking-water wells, leaving thousands of displaced people scrambling for bottled water that was air-dropped by the National Guard. In soggy neighborhoods, mosquitoes carrying Zika and dengue fever viruses hatched (injecting male mosquitoes with the Wolbachia bacteria, which public health officials had once hoped would inhibit the mosquitoes’ ability to transmit the viruses, had failed when the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry the diseases developed immunity to the bacteria). In Homestead, a low-lying working-class city in southern Miami-Dade County that had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, thousands of abandoned homes were bulldozed because they were deemed a public health hazard. “ In Miami Shores, developers approached city officials with proposals to buy out entire blocks of waterlogged apartments, then dredge the streets and turn them into canals lined with houseboats. But financing for these projects never materialized. “as a rich, self-indulgent city that had ignored decades of warnings about building too close to the water. Attempts had been made to armor the shore with seawalls and elevate buildings, but only a small percentage of the richest property owners took protective action. The beaches were mostly gone too. The Feds decided they couldn’t afford to spend $100 million every few years to pump in fresh sand, and without replenishment, the ever-higher tides carried the beaches away. By the late 2020s, the only beaches that remained were privately maintained oases of sand in front of expensive hotels.” “The hurricane took care of those, leaving the hotels and condo towers perched on limestone crags. Tourists disappeared. After the hurricane, the city became a mecca for slumlords, spiritual healers, and lawyers. In the parts of the county that were still inhabitable, only the wealthiest could afford to insure their homes. Mortgages were nearly impossible to get, mostly because banks didn’t believe the homes would be there in thirty years.

Still, the waters kept rising, nearly a foot each decade. Each big storm devoured more of the coastline, pushing the water deeper and deeper into the city. The skyscrapers that had gone up during the boom years were gradually abandoned and used as “staging grounds for drug runners and exotic-animal traffickers. Crocodiles nested in the ruins of the Frost Museum of Science. (Historians dryly noted that the namesake of the museum, billionaire Phillip Frost, had been a climate change skeptic.) Still, the waters kept rising. By the end of the twenty-first century, Miami became something else entirely: a popular diving spot where people could swim among sharks and barnacled SUVs and explore the wreckage of a great American city.”

“That is, of course, merely one possible vision of the future. There are brighter ways to imagine it—and darker ways. But I am a journalist, not a Hollywood screenwriter. In this book, I want to tell a true story about the future we are creating for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. It begins with this: the climate is warming, the world’s great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”

“My own interest in this story began with an actual hurricane. Shortly after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, I visited the Lower East “Side of Manhattan, one of the neighborhoods that had been hardest hit by flooding from the storm. The water had receded by the time I arrived, but the neighborhood already smelled of mold and rot. The power was out, the shops were closed. I saw broken trees, abandoned cars, debris scattered everywhere, people hauling ruined furniture out of basement apartments. Dark waterlines were visible on many shop windows and doors. The surge in the East River had been more than nine feet high, overwhelming the seawall and inundating the low-lying parts of Lower Manhattan. As I walked around, watching people slowly put their lives back together, I wondered what would have happened if, instead of flooding the city and then receding in a few hours, the Atlantic Ocean had come in and stayed in.

“I have been writing about climate change for more than a decade, but seeing the flooding on the Lower East Side made it visceral for me (I hadn’t visited New Orleans until several years after Katrina hit—the TV images of the flooding there, catastrophic as they were, did not affect me as strongly as my walk through the Lower East Side). A year or so before Sandy rolled in, I had interviewed NASA scientist James Hansen, the godfather of climate change science, who told me that if nothing was “done to slow the burning of fossil fuels, sea levels could be as much as ten feet higher by the end of the century. At the time, I didn’t grasp the full implications of this. After Sandy, I did.”

“Soon after my visit to Lower Manhattan, I found myself in Miami, learning about the porous limestone foundation the city is built on and the flatness of the topography. During high tide, I waded knee-deep through dark ocean water in several Miami Beach neighborhoods; I saw high water backing up into working-class neighborhoods far to the west, near the border of the Everglades. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that I was standing in a modern-day Atlantis-in-the-making. It became clear to me just how poorly our world is prepared to deal with the rising waters. Unlike, say, a global pandemic, sea-level rise is not a direct threat to human survival. “Early humans had no problem adapting to rising seas—they just moved to higher ground. But in the modern world, that’s not so easy. There’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the Fossil Fuel Age—the housing and office developments on the coasts, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the airports—that makes us most vulnerable.”

“Rising and falling seas represent one of the ancient rhythms of Earth, the background track that has played during the entire four-billion-year life of the planet. Scientists have understood this for a long time. Even in relatively recent history, sea levels have fluctuated wildly, driven by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit that change the angle and intensity of the sunlight hitting the planet and cause ice ages to come and go. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, during the last interglacial period, when the temperature of the Earth was very much like it is today, sea levels were twenty to thirty feet higher. Then, twenty thousand years ago, during the peak of the last ice age, sea levels were four hundred feet lower.”

“What’s different today is that humans are interfering with this natural rhythm by heating up the planet and melting the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Until just a few decades ago, most scientists believed these ice sheets were so big and so indomitable that not even seven billion humans with all their fossil-fuel-burning toys could have much impact on them in the short term. Now they know better.”

“In the twentieth century, the oceans rose about six inches. But that was before the heat from burning fossil fuels had much impact on Greenland and Antarctica (about half of the recorded sea-level rise in the twentieth century came from the expansion of the warming oceans). Today, seas are rising at more than twice the rate they did in the last century. As warming of the Earth increases and the ice sheets begin to feel the heat, the rate of sea-level rise is likely to increase rapidly. “ A 2017 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the United States’ top climate science agency, says global sea-level rise could range from about one foot to more than eight feet by 2100. Depending on how much we heat up the planet, it will continue rising for centuries after that. Although there is still some uncertainty about these forecasts, many scientists I’ve talked to now believe that the high-end projections are likely to increase as they get a better understanding of ice dynamics. Temperature-wise, the trend lines are rising: 2016 was the hottest year on record, and as I’m writing this, the Arctic is thirty-six degrees warmer than normal.”

“But if you live on the coast, what matters more than the height the seas rise to is the rate at which they rise. If the water rises slowly, it’s not such a big deal. People will have time to elevate roads and buildings and build seawalls. Or move away. It is likely to be disruptive but manageable. Unfortunately, Mother Nature is not always so docile. In “the past, the seas have risen in dramatic pulses that coincide with the sudden collapse of ice sheets. After the end of the last ice age, there is evidence that the water rose about thirteen feet in a single century. If that were to occur again, it would be a catastrophe for coastal cities around the world, causing hundreds of millions of people to flee from the coastlines and submerging trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate and infrastructure.”

“The best way to save coastal cities is to quit burning fossil fuels (if you’re still questioning the link between human activity and climate change, you’re reading the wrong book). But even if we ban coal, gas, and oil tomorrow, we won’t be able to turn down the Earth’s thermostat immediately. For one thing, carbon dioxide (CO2) is not like other kinds of air pollution, such as the chemicals that cause smog, which go away as soon as you stop dumping them into the sky (as happened, by and large, when catalytic converters were installed on cars). A good fraction of the CO2 emitted today will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years. That means that even if we did reduce CO2 tomorrow, we can’t shut off the warming from the CO2 we’ve already dumped into the air. “The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge,” scientist David Archer writes. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”

“For sea-level rise, the slow response of the Earth’s climate system has enormous long-term implications. Even if we replaced every SUV on the planet with a skateboard and every coal plant with a solar panel and could magically reduce global carbon pollution to zero by tomorrow, because of the heat that has already built up in the atmosphere and the oceans, the seas would not stop rising—at least until the Earth cooled off, which could take centuries.”

“This doesn’t mean that cutting CO2 is pointless. On the contrary. If we can hold the warming to about three degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial temperatures, we might only face two feet of sea-level rise this century, giving people more time to adapt. However, if we don’t end the fossil fuel party, we’re headed for more than eight degrees Fahrenheit of warming—and with that, all bets are off. We could get four feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century—or we could get thirteen feet. The long-term consequences are even more alarming. If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, “submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.”

“The tricky thing about dealing with sea-level rise is that it’s impossible to witness by just hanging out at the beach for a few weeks. Instead, the rise will make itself felt in higher storm surges, higher tides, and a gradual washing away of beaches, of roads, of coastal infrastructure. Even in the worst-case scenarios, the changes will occur over years and decades and centuries, not seconds and minutes and hours. It’s exactly the kind of threat that we humans are genetically ill equipped to deal with. We have evolved to defend ourselves from a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth, but we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We’re not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.”

“One architect I met while researching this book joked that with enough money, you can engineer your way out of anything. I suppose it’s true. If you had enough money, you could raise or rebuild every street and building in Miami by ten feet and the city would be in pretty good shape for the next century or so. But we do not live in a world where money is no object, and one of the hard truths about sea-level rise is that rich cities and nations can afford to build seawalls, upgrade sewage systems, and elevate critical infrastructure. “Poor cities and nations cannot. But even for rich countries, the economic losses will be high. One recent study estimated that with six feet of sea-level rise, nearly $1 trillion worth of real estate in the United States will be underwater, including one in eight homes in Florida. If no significant action is taken, global damages from sea-level rise could reach $100 trillion a year by 2100.”

“But it is not just money that will be lost. Also gone will be the beach where you first kissed your boyfriend; the mangrove forests in Bangladesh where Bengal tigers thrive; the crocodile nests in Florida Bay; Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley; St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina; America’s biggest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; NASA’s Kennedy Space Center; graves on the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania; the slums of Jakarta, Indonesia; entire nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; and, in the not-so-distant future, Mar-a-Lago, the summer White House of President Donald Trump. Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.”

“The real x factor here is not the vagaries of climate science, but the complexity of human psychology. At what point will we take dramatic action to cut CO2 pollution? Will we spend billions on adaptive infrastructure to prepare cities for rising waters—or will we do nothing until it is too late? Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them? No one knows how our economic and political system will deal with these challenges. The simple truth is, human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn’t intend and don’t entirely understand. Every day, little by little, the water is rising, washing away beaches, eroding coastlines, pushing into homes and shops and places of worship. As our world floods, it is likely to cause immense suffering and devastation. It is also likely to bring people together and inspire creativity and camaraderie in ways that no one can foresee. “Either way, the water is coming. As Hal Wanless, a geologist at the University of Miami, told me in his deep Old Testament voice as we drove toward the beach one day, “If you’re not building a boat, then you don’t understand what’s happening here.”

“1. THE OLDEST STORY EVER TOLD”

“THE R/V KNORR was a storied ship in the annals of science, known for its ability to take a pounding in rough seas and its unusual arrangement of propellers in the bow and stern that made it highly maneuverable. Scientists had used the Knorr, a 244-foot steel-hulled research vessel that was operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for thousands of research expeditions around the world, including one that led to the discovery of the wreck of the RMS Titanic. A few years ago, I spent a month aboard the Knorr. On my trip, we were looking for nothing more glamorous than good, thick mud on the floor of the North Atlantic. By drilling cores in the mud and analyzing the shells of creatures buried within it, researchers can better understand past ocean temperature and salinity, which are important as scientists attempt to reconstruct the history of the Earth’s climate.”

“Most of our time was spent cruising around the Bermuda Rise, a cluster of extinct underwater volcanos near Bermuda, pausing to take core samples of the mud whenever the conditions looked good. At one point, we were about a hundred miles off the coast of New York City when we drifted over a place known to scientists as the Hudson Canyon, which is where the Hudson River used to drop over the continental shelf twenty thousand years ago when seas were lower. From the ship, a device called an acoustic echo machine painted colorful real-time images of the canyon as we passed over it. It was a remarkable sight: you could see where the Hudson had cut a path through the shelf, creating terraces and high walls. “The canyon extends over 450 miles across the shelf, eventually reaching a depth of over 10,000 feet. “It’s bigger than the Grand Canyon,” Lloyd Keigwin, the chief scientist on the trip, told me as I looked down in wonder.

“Twenty thousand years ago, near the peak of the last ice age, the world was a very different place than it is today. Temperatures were about seven degrees Fahrenheit cooler and the climate was, in most places, drier. In North America, all the ice-age creatures we know and love from Ice Age, the movie—mammoths, sloths, saber-toothed tigers—roamed through the plains and forests. In the West, you could walk from what’s now San Francisco to the Farallon Islands. The Laurentide ice sheet, thousands of feet thick in places, covered most of Canada and the Upper Midwest and spread along the East Coast all the way to New York City. In Europe, it was dry land from London to Paris, and up north, from Scotland all the way over to Sweden. In Asia, you could walk from Thailand to Indonesia, and then take a boat down to Australia.”

“And people did. One wave of migration, as every American kid learns in middle school, brought humans across the land bridge between Asia and North America, thus laying the groundwork for the birth of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Exactly why and when human beings made the trip across the land bridge in the first place is much debated. Until recently, the best guess for the date of the arrival of humans in North America was 13,200 years ago. Many anthropologists believed it couldn’t have been much earlier than that because although the land bridge was open, much of North America was covered in an ice sheet until then, making it virtually impossible for even the most intrepid early explorers to travel down into the interior of the continent.”

“But that narrative has been challenged. In 2012, Jessi Halligan, a young anthropologist at Florida State University, led a team of divers to explore the Aucilla River about seventy-five miles from Tallahassee. The Aucilla is a slow, dark, mysterious river that winds across northern Florida’s limestone plateau toward the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier archaeologists had pulled up boatloads of bison bones, saber-toothed tiger bones, and mastodon bones and tusks, some with markings that looked like humans could have made them. During the ice age, the sea had met the land a hundred miles farther out, and the area where the Aucilla now flows was high savannah. “Springwater bubbled and pooled in the limestone, creating watering holes where animals gathered to drink. As the seas rose and the water backed up, these watering holes filled with sediment, covering and preserving the bones of the animals that had died along the waterholes.

In May of 2013, Halligan’s team made one of those scientific finds that change the way we view the world. In a sinkhole in the river, surrounded by mastodon dung, they found a two-faced knife that could only have been made by humans. More important, Halligan was able to precisely carbon-date the knife to 14,500 years ago.

“That finding is important in a number of ways. First, it is indisputable proof that humans were hanging around in Florida a thousand years earlier than had been previously understood. There was other evidence that humans had been in North America earlier, including artifacts at archaeological sites in places as far-flung as Oregon and Chile, but none were as solid as this one. Second, it suggests that these early immigrants were more creative and resourceful than researchers had previously understood. “We know that until about twelve thousand, six hundred years ago, the route from Alaska down to the interior of the continent was blocked by ice,” said Halligan. “The only way people could have gotten from Asia to this spot in Florida fourteen thousand, “five hundred years ago that doesn’t involve time travel or teleporting is if they came by boat.” Halligan suggested they might have come down the West Coast, perhaps to Central America, then across the Gulf to Florida. If this is true, then these Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were building boats, understanding currents, navigating coastlines, and storing food and water. Of course, looking for evidence of this path down the coast is nearly impossible—many artifacts and campsites are now under three hundred feet or so of Pacific Ocean.”

“What is most important about this discovery—at least for the purposes of this book—is that the date of the double-sided knife corresponds with the sudden disintegration of the ice sheets at the end of the last ice age.”

“Scientists refer to the event as Meltwater Pulse 1A. It occurred just as the Earth was warming at the end of the last ice age. In coral reefs and other geologic sites around the world, scientists have seen that in the space of about 350 years, starting 14,500 years ago, the oceans began rising at a dramatic rate—more than a foot per decade. They know that this kind of sudden rise could only come from the collapse of a very big chunk of ice; the most likely candidates are the Laurentide ice sheet that covered North America and the glaciers of “Antarctica. Scientists don’t know the mechanism for the collapse, whether it was the sudden breaking of a giant ice dam in North America that was holding back meltwater from the Laurentide, or warm ocean water getting up under the ice sheets of West Antarctica. But the geological evidence for the event itself is indisputable. It happened.”

“Due to the flat topography of coastal Florida, the rising seas would have been particularly dramatic to anyone living there. Halligan estimates that the seas moved inland at a rate of five hundred to six hundred feet a year. That’s a mile of coastline lost per decade—fast enough that you could almost watch the water come in while you gutted fish on the beach.”

“Halligan doubts that sea-level rise was the reason people abandoned the watering hole, since evidence so far suggests that the butchery at the site occurred over a very short period (they left no written accounts, which isn’t surprising, since writing hadn’t been invented yet). But whatever happened, it’s clear that rising seas were radically reshaping the world they lived in. And they weren’t the only ones who were dealing with it. At the time of Meltwater Pulse 1A, there were about three million people living on the Earth—nearly the population of Los Angeles today. They were living in small groups, making tools, hunting game, taking baby steps on the long ladder to modern life. What did they think about? What did they fear? Researchers can only make inferences from campsites, tools, and stray artifacts.”

“The most revealing clues, however, may come from the stories they left behind.

Nicholas Reid is an Australian linguist who studies the dying languages of Australian aborigines. Back in the 1970s, during his undergraduate days, he read a book called A Grammar of Yidi, about a nearly extinct aboriginal language spoken in northern Australia. For years, one particular sentence in the book stuck with him: “It is, however, worth noting that a theme running through all the coastal Yidinji myths is that the coastline was once where the barrier reef now stands (as in fact it was some 10,000 years ago), but the sea then rose and the shore retreated to its current position. “The idea lingered with Reid over the years. Was it possible that a ten-thousand-year-old event such as sea-level rise could be the basis for aboriginal myths?

In 2014, Reid mentioned the idea to a colleague, Patrick Nunn, a marine geologist who had studied sea-level rise in the Pacific. Nunn suggested that if the specifics in the myths were clear enough and detailed enough, they could be corroborated with geological data, allowing him and Reid to essentially date the origins of the myths.”

“Aboriginal societies have existed in Australia for around sixty-five thousand years, isolated until the European colonization of the continent in 1788. Australia was undoubtedly a hard environment to live in, and survival through the generations depended on passing down information about food, the landscape, and the climate. But that didn’t necessarily mean the stories the Aboriginals told were, after thousands of years of retelling, in any sense “precise.”

“It had long been assumed by linguists that the oldest oral stories are eight hundred years old—after that, any specific references in the stories are lost,” Reid explained to me. “How could a story be told accurately, over and over again, for ten thousand years?”

“Still, it was a fascinating possibility. Reid began reading aboriginal myths, many of them collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Western researchers. Without trying too hard, he found twenty-one examples of stories about sea-level rise. Each one was different, but they seemed to be chronicling a time when the sea was rising and the people who lived on the coasts and the islands were grappling with how to deal with it. In regions of Australia where the coastal land had a low topography, even a small rise in sea level would have claimed large chunks of land relatively quickly. “People must have been aware that every year the sea was getting higher,” Reid said. “And they must have had stories from their fathers and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, that the sea used to be out even further.”

“Here is one example:

In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today. They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland and we roamed freely throughout the land without having to get in a boat like we do today. Then Garnguur, the seagull woman, took her raft and dragged it back and forth across the neck of the peninsula, letting the sea pour in and making our homes into islands.

This story is about the origin of the Wellesley Islands off the northern coast of Australia, and it parallels other stories from other parts of Australia. Along the south coast, stories written down early in colonial times told about when these areas were dry, a time when people hunted kangaroo and emu there, before the water rose and flooded them, never again to recede.

“There are numerous Aboriginal stories from this area about a time when the shoreline was further out ‘where the barrier reef now stands,’” Reid told me. According to one of the stories, the barrier reef was the original coast at a time when a man called Gunya was living there. Gunya consumed a customarily forbidden fish, which made the gods angry. To punish him, they caused the sea to rise in order to drown him and his family. “He evaded this fate by fleeing to the hills but the sea never returned to its original limits,” Reid said.”

“Another story collected from the Yidinji people of the Cairns area—now a coastal town that is a frequent jumping-off point for expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef—recalls a time when Fitzroy Island, which is now a mile or so off the coast, was part of the mainland. The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater. According to Nunn and Reid, based on the details in the story, researchers can be almost certain that the people of this area occupied the coast “where the Great Barrier Reef now stands” during the last ice age, when it was a broad floodplain with undulating hills, bordered by steep cliffs—which are now islands like Fitzroy.”

“Our expectation originally was that the sea level must have been creeping up very slowly and not been noticeable in an individual’s lifetime,” Reid told me. “But we’ve come to realize through conducting this research that Australia must in fact have been abuzz with news about this. There must have been constant inland movement, reestablishing relationships with the country, negotiating with inland neighbors about encroaching onto their territory. There would have been massive ramifications of this.”

“Still, the idea that these stories were a chronicling of actual events was remarkable. “If you are talking about ten thousand years, you are really talking about three hundred to four hundred generations,” Reid said. “The idea that you can transmit anything over four hundred generations is extraordinary.” But Reid believes a key feature of Australian Aboriginal storytelling culture—a “cross-generational cross-checking” process—could explain the stories’ endurance through the millennia. In this process, a father will pass down the story to his sons—and the son’s nephews and nieces will be responsible for ensuring that their uncle knows those stories correctly.”

“These stories, of course, tell us nothing about what these aboriginal tribes thought or felt about the seas rising around them. But they do capture how deeply significant and strange this experience must have been, how inexplicable.”

“The best-known flood story in the Western world, of course, is Noah’s. In the Old Testament, the story is told of how Noah builds an ark and loads all the animals into it so they can survive the flood that God sends to cleanse the Earth. In God’s view, there is just too much corruption and debauchery going on in his lovingly created paradise, and he has to do something about it. It’s a powerful story of sin and redemption, but it’s not original to the Old Testament. Most Biblical scholars believe that the story of Noah is based on an even earlier flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the tale of the adventures of a Mesopotamian king that was written two thousand years before the Bible.”

“There is nothing in the Bible itself—or in Gilgamesh—that suggests these stories have anything to do with sea-level rise ten thousand years ago—or any other time. In both cases, the flood is caused by epic rains.

But two scholars think it’s more complex than that. William Ryan and Walter Pitman, both geologists at Columbia University, argue that Gilgamesh, as well as the later Noah flood story, are based on a real event that occurred in the Black Sea about seven thousand years ago, when the seas were still rising at the end of the last ice age. At the time, the Black Sea was an isolated freshwater lake, cut off from the Mediterranean Sea by a high, narrow strip of land in what is now Turkey. Small groups of people lived on the fertile land around it, fishing from small boats and experimenting with growing crops for food.”

“As the ice melted, the Mediterranean rose higher and higher, and by about 5600 BCE, it had risen to a point where it was 500 feet above the Black Sea. Then the strip of land between them collapsed, and the seawater flowed over it. So much water poured in so fast it cut a flume—now the Bosporus Strait—280 feet wide and 450 feet deep. Ryan and Pitman calculated that ten cubic miles of water rushed through each day, two hundred times what goes over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan each day with water a half mile deep. The level of the lake rose six inches a day, inundating the deltas and invading the flat river valleys—moving upstream as much as a mile each day. “It’s hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, “a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at them,” Pitman and Ryan have written. “They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of other languages, new ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake.”

“After two years, the lake water had risen 330 feet, until the lake was at the same level as the Mediterranean Sea. The people who had lived around the lake scattered to Europe and the Middle East, spreading their agricultural skills and know-how into the West and down into what became Mesopotamia, where stories of the flood became the basis for the flood story in Gilgamesh—and later, the Bible.

It’s not a thesis all scientists accept. Liviu Giosan of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues from the University of Bucharest drilled cores in the area, examining the sedimentary data near where the Danube River empties into the Black Sea. They found evidence that Black Lake/Sea water levels rose only about half as much as Ryan and his colleagues proposed and would have drowned only about 800 square miles of land (about half of Rhode Island), rather than the 25,000 square miles (more than the entire state of West Virginia) that Ryan and Pitman suggested.”

“However serious the Black Sea flood may have been, researchers will likely never know for sure whether or not it inspired the flood stories in Gilgamesh or the Bible. But it is certainly true that flooding was a frequent and destructive occurrence in the ancient world and a common metaphor for political and social dissolution. In both Gilgamesh and the Bible, the flood is a catastrophe—but it’s also a cleansing, and a way of preparing the fallen world for a new order to emerge.”

“Unlike other ice-age mammals, humans had adapted to a changing climate and rising seas pretty well. One group who probably managed this better than most was the Calusa, a Native American tribe who lived in South Florida until they were wiped out by smallpox-bearing Europeans in the eighteenth century. To get better insight into how they lived, I visited Mound Key Archaeological State Park, which is on an island on Florida’s Gulf Coast that was the ancient capital of the Calusa.”

“My guide was Theresa Schober, an archaeologist and former museum director who had been studying the Calusa for more than a decade. I met her at the boat launch at Lovers Key State Park near Fort Myers and we loaded our gear onto a sixteen-foot fishing boat that was piloted by a friend of hers. Schober, then forty-six, was tall and thin and muscular, with an infectious enthusiasm for Calusa lore. We sped across Estero Bay, dodging Jet Skis and other fishing boats beneath a sky that was full of the towering, tumbling clouds that Florida is so good at creating. From a distance, Mound Key looked like any other Florida island—low and green and peaceful. The only thing remarkable about it was that it was entirely artificial, an island built by the Calusa from their discarded seashells.”

“We approached the island through a tangle of mangroves, idling up a narrow channel that felt like a portal to another time. As Schober explained to me while we struggled out of the boat onto a small beach, Calusa meant “fierce people” in their language. No one knows exactly how long the Calusa lived in this region, but it was likely thousands of years. Their first European encounter was in 1513 with Ponce de León, the Spanish explorer who, legend has it, was in search of the Fountain of Youth. The Calusa attacked his ships and drove them away. Unwisely, he returned to the area nearly a decade later. The Calusa attacked again—this time, they “shot de León with an arrow poisoned with the sap of the manchineel, an applelike tree that grows among the mangroves in Florida. The Spanish name for it is árbol de la muerte, or “tree of death,” because the sap contains nasty toxins, including an organic compound called phorbol. De León died a few weeks later in Puerto Rico.”

“I dug my heel into the sand on the beach, thinking I might see an ancient oyster shell. “You’ll have to go a little deeper,” Schober joked. It was hard to believe that this entire island—all 125 acres—was created by generations of early Americans tossing oyster and mussel shells out the back door of their palapas. It was basically a well-engineered dump. Hunter-gatherers left these shell middens, as they are called, all over the world, from Australia to Denmark. In Florida, there are middens on both coasts and alongside most rivers. Many coastal middens are underwater or have been destroyed by development. But Mound Key, Schober explained, was in pretty good shape.”

“As we headed down a path through the mangroves, Schober told me that when the Spanish arrived, there were about a thousand people living on and around the island. But they were hardly isolated. They traded furs, food, glass beads, and other goods with neighboring tribes—there’s even evidence that they canoed all the way to Cuba.

“Did they leave behind any art? Any stories?”

“Nothing,” Schober said. “They were wiped out. These middens are it.”

“After hiking for twenty minutes or so, we came to what looked like a wide, shallow ditch cutting across the trail. “This was the grand canal,” she explained. “The Calusa were very good at engineering with water. They built canals, with locks to control the water, as well as big water courts that functioned like a city square. Water was not something they resisted—it was deeply a part of their lives.”

“Of course, the Calusa were not the only people who knew how to live with water. In New England, Native Americans lived in wood-framed houses that were covered with grass mats or bark so they could be taken down and transported by water. In parts of Newfoundland, a practice called launching is still common: when the waters rise or the shore changes, houses are dragged on wooden sleds to new locations. During the Revolutionary War, Tories escaping from Maine brought their houses with them to New Brunswick, where they still line the harbor. Houses on Cape Cod were also moved and recycled. One observer found that the residents thought of their “houses less as family seats, founded for the ages, than as temporary shelters, like the borrowed shells of hermit crabs, to be shifted about and exchanged, in location and function, as the need arose.”

“Much of this is forgotten knowledge now.

“I was living here in South Florida when Hurricane Charley came through,” Schober said. Charley was a Category 4 hurricane that blew through the area in 2004. “People lost power, couldn’t get gas for their cars. It was a total disaster for lots of people.” Schober pointed out that the Calusa had to deal with hurricanes and storms too, but for them, it was probably not a big deal. “They just rebuilt their homes; it was part of their lives. If the storm changed the shoreline, that was how it was. If it blew over their huts, they could rebuild them. I don’t think they had a sense of permanence, a sense that their world was settled. Their world was changing every day.”

We left the canal and climbed a narrow trail through the mangroves to the top of the midden, which was about thirty feet high. In South Florida, “that feels like Mount Everest. “The chief’s house would have been up here,” Schober explained. “The higher your house, the more prestigious it was—just like in cities today.”

It was an oddly hopeful moment: here I was, standing on an artificial island built by Calusa a thousand years ago, one oyster shell at a time. Schober explained how the shells interlocked and calcified together over time, creating a solid structure that has survived for thousands of years. It was not just a monument to human ingenuity, but also a sign that living with water is something our ancestors have been doing for a very long time. Of course, the Calusa didn’t have to worry about salt water corroding electrical wiring, or property values crashing, or nuclear power plants melting down as they got swamped by rising seas.”

“2. LIVING WITH NOAH”

“LIKE ANY RESPECTABLE Miami lawyer, Wayne Pathman owns a Ferrari and lives in a big house on the water in the Sunset Islands neighborhood of Miami Beach. The Sunset Islands (there are four), like many of the islands that have arisen in Biscayne Bay, were created by digging up mud and piling it high and then surrounding it with a wall to keep the mud from washing away. Basically, it’s the same thing the Calusa did for thousands of years. Many of the homes on the islands, which are just a few feet above sea level, go for $10 or $15 million and have stunning views of downtown Miami. Pathman lives just down the street from Philip Levine, the wealthy mayor of Miami Beach, and not far from a $25-million Mediterranean Revival mansion that rocker Lenny Kravitz once owned. Pathman, who was in his early fifties at the time of this writing, grew up in Miami Beach and built his career handling land lease and zoning negotiations for Miami “businesses and developers. In 2017, he became chairman of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce, where he has worked hard to get Miami’s business leaders to understand the risks of sea-level rise and, among other things, stop building developments right on the water. “Noah was right,” he told me at dinner one night. “When you talk about flooding, nobody listens. They all think it’s not their problem. Have you taken a helicopter up and seen the cranes?”

“I had not, but it sounded like a good idea to me. A few weeks later, I found myself up in the air with Sheryl Gold, another Miami Beach native and longtime community activist, and Roni Avissar, a former Israeli military pilot who is now a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. We flew from a small heliport to the west of the city, near the Everglades, then swooped in toward Miami at low altitude. I could see boats cruising across Biscayne Bay, people sunbathing on rooftops. But Pathman was right: from the air, downtown Miami was a forest of cranes. Most of the construction was condo towers. A number of them were designed by rock-star architects like Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid and were architecturally interesting in an early-twenty-first-century postmodern sort of way. But from the helicopter, they all looked the same.”

“From the air, you could see how the city pushed up against the ocean. And it wasn’t just new condo towers—it was hotels, hospitals, university buildings. They were all right on the shore, dangling their toes in the water.

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, a book about the dangers of pesticides that inspired the modern environmental movement, tried to articulate the roots of our desire to live near water. She wrote about how life itself grew out of the sea, and how “each of us began his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.” Carson foresaw humanity making its way back to the sea, where, if it could not return to the ocean physically, it would “re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.”

From the air, that was precisely what seemed to be happening in Miami.”

“A few billion years ago, Florida was part of Africa. When the Atlantic Ocean opened up, Florida was left behind, stuck onto the North American continent. It was just a big chunk of rock. Sea levels rose and fell over Earth’s history, covering Florida with hundreds of feet of ocean water for millions of years, then exposing it again. Each time the water was high—and that was a majority of the time—the ocean was full of microscopic creatures that ate and shit and died. Their skeletons and excrement and shells drifted to the bottom, along with bits of coral and grains of sand and mud, most of which washed down from the Appalachian Mountains in the north and onto what is now Florida. Eventually, all this stuff went through a chemical transformation that cemented it together and turned it into limestone. That limestone grew thicker and thicker, an accumulation of excrement and skeletons and coral that is now three thousand feet deep in some places.”

“During the rise and fall of the seas, the water sometimes paused long enough to allow reefs to form, or to create little pearl-like grains called ooids. One particularly unusual set of conditions arose about 120,000 years ago, when sea levels were about twenty feet higher than they are today. Along the southern coast of Florida, shallow, warm, turbulent waters created what was essentially an ooid factory, where bits of shells and pellets of muddy shrimp excrement and coral could tumble around and acquire a fine coating of carbonate that gave them a pearly luster. When the ooids grew to about the size of large grains of sand, they settled to the bottom. (You can see the same process on certain beaches in the Bahamas today.) Over time, the ooids piled up, and, when sea levels fell again, cemented into ooid limestone. Eventually the ooids themselves weathered away, leaving behind an unusual limestone with holes in it. That pile of porous ooid limestone is now part of what is known as the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, which is roughly thirteen feet above sea level and runs from Palm Beach down to about Homestead. More than five million people live along that ridge today.”

“In the pancake-flat topography of southern Florida, the emergence of the coastal ridge is a big deal. It prevented water from draining from the flat land to the west of the ridge, turning it into a swamp that became the Everglades. Eventually, a few rivers worked through low spots, allowing some water to flow out of the swamp (the Miami River, which cuts through downtown, is the biggest). Over time, the old reef eroded. Seeds lodged here and there. ”

“Hardy trees like pine and mahogany grew, and the ridge became a rocky highway between the swamp and the beach. The Tequesta, a Native American tribe on the east coast of Florida that was related to the Calusa on the west coast, used it for travel, as did panthers and deer and other dry-land-loving creatures of South Florida. And in 1890, it was here on the coastal ridge, right at the mouth of the Miami River, that a forty-one-year-old widow named Julia Tuttle bought a house that was once part of Fort Dallas, a remote military outpost built in the early nineteenth century. Tuttle fixed up the old house and made it a showplace—she was arguably the first person to grasp both the beauty of the landscape and the opportunities to get rich quick in South Florida.”

“Tuttle’s home is long gone, of course. But there’s a historic marker on the spot. If there is a dead center of today’s Miami, the middle of the crane forest, this is it. On either side, towering condos look out over Biscayne Bay, toward the port and Miami Beach. As I walked along the shore one day, enormous yachts motored up the river, some blaring Drake or Kanye West, festooned with men and women in skimpy bathing suits. I flashed back to pictures I’d seen of Tuttle, “the Mother of Miami,” who first persuaded Henry Flagler, the exceedingly “rich cofounder of Standard Oil, to build a railroad down to this godforsaken place. The story of her sending orange blossoms in 1896 to Flagler, who had a house in Palm Beach, and persuading him to extend his railroad from Palm Beach to Miami is the founding myth of the city. And once Flagler’s railroad arrived—well, you know what happened. The twentieth century happened.

“Although they didn’t know they were living atop an old coral reef, the locals called the high rocky ridges reefs and the lower sandy, soggy areas glades or sinks. Homesteaders liked the glade because it did not require clearing and the soil was good for raising vegetables—especially winter vegetables that grew to maturity before the summer rains. Once you cleared out the pine and mahogany, the rocky ridges turned out to be good for citrus. The elevation of the ridges also gave protection from the biggest threat settlers faced there: water. In South Florida, that boundary between water and land was always amorphous.”

“Exhibit A: the memoirs of George Merrick, who was the founder of Coral Gables, a master-planned community south of Miami, where much of the Florida gentry (including former governor Jeb Bush) now lives. In 1901, Merrick was a fifteen-year-old boy living on the family homestead near Miami. The house was up on the coastal ridge, but that didn’t stop the water when torrential rains hit that year. “We were living with Noah,” Merrick later wrote in an account of his life on the homestead. All the land below the coastal ridge flooded. The Merricks’ vegetable garden disappeared under six feet of water. Roads became impassable, and on the low ones, the water was so deep that some wagons floated away.”

“Inside their “ark,” as Merrick called their house, it was even worse. As the water rose, the family pulled boards off the barn and nailed them to the cabin floor to elevate it above the floodwaters. Armies of roaches and other insects sought refuge inside the house. “The more we killed, the more the roaches seemed to reappear, as if raining from the skies,” Merrick wrote. The frogs invaded too: “There was something horrifying in the clamor that unceasingly enveloped the cabin. The din was as if every rain drop, as ceaselessly they fell, gave birth to a new voice; a new croak, gurgle, gurk, grackle and shriek.” Alligators swam in from the Everglades, bellowing, devouring half-drowned rabbits. Merrick and his father floated wood in from the barn for the cookstove on a makeshift raft. Then the manure pit overflowed, causing Merrick’s father’s feet to break out in wormlike red eruptions, which Merrick’s mother tried to cure by pouring iodine into the open wounds.”

“Early settlers like the Merricks understood that if civilization was going to continue, something had to be done about the water. More important, these pioneers figured out that draining the Everglades was the equivalent of creating free land. By 1909, dredging of the Miami Canal had begun, and what followed was perhaps the most rapid, most dramatic, most heedless remaking of a landscape that humans had ever attempted. When this massive water-diversion scheme was finished, thousands of acres in the Everglades had been drained dry and opened up to the speculators.”

“And speculate they did. The taming of the Everglades unleashed a land boom that was unlike anything seen before in America. “From the time the Hebrews went into Egypt, or since the hegira of Mohammed the prophet, what can compare to this?” one newspaper mused. The pilgrims included celebrities like the boxer Gene Tunney, the actor Errol Flynn, and businessmen such as Alfred du Pont, J. C. Penney, and Henry Ford. But ordinary Americans also headed to Florida to get rich, enjoy vacations, or retire in a sunny climate. “The suntan, once a symbol of labor, became a symbol of leisure,” Michael Grunwald writes in The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.

But even then, there were dissenters. As Grunwald points out, Charles Torrey Simpson, the most eloquent of Florida’s preservationists, suggested a new ethic in which Floridians no longer considered themselves superior to nature and stopped trying to tame it and exploit it:”

“There is something very distressing in the gradual destruction of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty—and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions, his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions. Soon this vast, lonely, beautiful waste will be reclaimed and tamed; soon it will be furrowed by canals and highways and spanned by steel rails. A busy, toiling people will occupy the places that sheltered a wealth of wildlife.… In place of the cries of wild birds will be heard the whistle of the locomotive and the honk of the automobile. We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say: Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. “But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings.”

“Geologically speaking, Miami Beach is a new kid in town. Three thousand years ago, around the time the Great Pyramids were being built, the sandbar that we now call Miami Beach began to form on the platform of ooids off the coast. The sand (most of which was ground-up rocks from the fast-eroding Appalachian Mountains) began to collect in the shallow water. Mangrove seeds washed up. Insects arrived. By the late 1800s, it was a dense tangle of mangrove and palmetto, rattlesnakes, rats, mosquitoes, and other insects. “Virgin jungle crept right down to the beach, a jungle as dense, forbidding and impenetrable as only the tropics can produce,” one early visitor wrote. “It was impossible to proceed more than a few feet into its depths without hacking a path with a machete.”

“For most of human history, few people thought of beaches as welcoming places. In fact, for early European explorers, the beach had been a place to be avoided. It was a place where you might land your boat, but otherwise it was a treacherous zone that was associated with death and disease and that marked the line between civilization and nature. When the English, Dutch, and French began to settle the New World in the seventeenth century, they weren’t scouting potential beach resorts. They wanted timber, fur, and fish”

“In Europe, the first people to occupy the beach and build houses facing the sea were upper-and middle-class landlubbers who were convinced of the therapeutic quality of sea air and water. In the mid-eighteenth century, lured by extravagant promises of miracle cures, English invalids and hypochondriacs began gathering in places like Brighton, on the English Channel. They frolicked in newly invented bathing machines and spent hours beachcombing and sightseeing, activities that were completely alien to the locals, who, as novelist Jane Austen observed, avoided the water except when making a living from it: “Sea views are only for urban folk, who never experience its menace. The true sailor prefers to be landlocked rather than face the ocean.”

“By the mid-nineteenth century, people began building houses and hotels closer to the shore. Newly built piers in places like Atlantic City, New Jersey, were essentially extensions of land and carried visitors over rather than onto the beach itself, giving them a safe vantage point from which to look both to sea and back to land. For these early “vacationers, the pull of the beach was its very emptiness and “cleanliness”—no shipwrecks, no dead bodies washing up, no sign of dirty industrial life. One French sociologist called this the “aesthetic conquest of the shore by the vacation ideology.”

By the 1870s, Atlantic City was a full-fledged beach resort, and Coney Island had Ferris wheels and luxury hotels. But Miami Beach was still just a tangle of mangroves and mosquitoes. In 1876, the US government built what may have been the first permanent structure on Miami Beach—the Biscayne House of Refuge. Intended for victims of shipwrecks, of which there were many on this treacherous coastline, it was stocked with provisions, clothing, blankets, and first aid equipment. There must have been some romance to the place, however, because records show that the wife of Jack Peacock, keeper of the house, bore children there in 1885 and 1886.”

“In the 1890s, around the same time Tuttle was coaxing Flagler to build a railroad to Miami, the first speculators arrived on Miami Beach. The most important one was a New Jersey farmer named John Collins (the namesake of today’s Collins Avenue, a main thoroughfare in Miami Beach), who bought several hundred acres of the island for next to nothing, cleared some land, and planted 38,000 coconut trees, thinking he would make a fortune. It turned out to be a failure. He then planted 2,945 avocado trees, and they did a little better. “But the most notable thing Collins did was start building a bridge from Miami, across Biscayne Bay, to the sandbar, thinking it would draw in people and make land more valuable. And the most notable thing that did was capture the attention of Carl Fisher, a daring speed-obsessed Midwestern entrepreneur who got rich from his patent and manufacturing of the first mass-produced automobile headlight and helped create the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the first transcontinental highway. But mostly, Fisher was a huckster and a promoter who saw the potential of transforming Miami Beach into America’s winter playground. Fisher gave Collins the money to finish the bridge in exchange for several hundred acres of seemingly worthless swampland”