The Attacking Ocean

Contents

Preface

1. Minus One Hundred Twenty-Two Meters and Climbing

MILLENNIA OF DRAMATIC CHANGE

2. Doggerland

3. Euxine and Ta-Mehu

4. “Marduk Laid a Reed on the Face of the Waters”

CATASTROPHIC FORCES

5. “Men Were Swept Away by Waves”

6. “The Whole Shoreline Filled”

7. “The Abyss of the Depths Was Uncovered”

8. “The Whole Is Now One Festering Mess”

9. The Golden Waterway

10. “Wave in the Harbor”

CHALLENGING INUNDATIONS

11. A Right to Subsistence

12. The Dilemma of Islands

13. “The Crookedest River in the World”

14. “Here the Tide Is Ruled, by the Wind, the Moon and Us”

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Author’s Note

A Note on the Author

Also by Brian Fagan

Alternative Table of Contents

(For those who prefer to explore the narrative geographically)

Preface

FOR EVERYONE

1. Minus One Hundred Twenty-Two Meters and Climbing

WESTERN EUROPE

2. Doggerland

5. “Men Were Swept Away by Waves”

14. “Here the Tide Is Ruled, by the Wind, the Moon and Us”

THE MEDITERRANEAN, MESOPOTAMIA, AND THE NILE

3. Euxine and Ta-Mehu

4. “Marduk Laid a Reed on the Face of the Waters”

6. “The Whole Shoreline Filled”

7. “The Abyss of the Depths Was Uncovered”

SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, CHINA, AND JAPAN

8. “The Whole Is Now One Festering Mess”

11. A Right to Subsistence

9. The Golden Waterway

10. “Wave in the Harbor”

ISLANDS (ALASKA, PACIFIC, AND INDIAN OCEAN)

12. The Dilemma of Islands

NORTH AMERICA

13. “The Crookedest River in the World”

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Author’s Note

A Note on the Author

Also by Brian Fagan

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.

It came to the megacity at dusk, deceptively and unequally … In the lowlands, near the seashores, the harbors, the bays, the Sound, the river: apocalypse. The very ocean rose, tsunami-like, relentless, terrifying, bringing devastation by flood and wind and wind-shipped fire, and for some ten million people in a swath a thousand miles wide and encompassing sixteen states, darkness and dread.
*

—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.

Preface

Almost all my life, I’ve lived by the sea. I’ve 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 mind—a 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 breakers—not 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 you’ll anchor. Lying aground on a sandbank at thirty-five degrees is no fun, especially if it’s 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 years—since 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. It’s 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. We’re 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, we’re unaware of rising sea levels, unless we live along a low-lying coastline, where even a small rise can spread water over a wide area—as 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 world’s population was minuscule by today’s 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 today’s 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.

Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago except for local adjustments that caused often quite significant changes to low-lying places like the Nile delta. The curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. Imperceptible changes marked the centuries when Rome ruled the Western world and imperial China reached the height of its power. The Norse explored a North Atlantic identical to ours a thousand years ago; Christopher Columbus and the mariners of the European Age of Discovery sailed over seas that had changed little from the time of the pharaohs. But another variable was now in play, that of the world’s population, which climbed rapidly after 4000 B.C.E. By the time of Christ, at least two hundred million people lived on earth. The number had reached a billion or so by the late eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution was under way. The densest of these growing populations lived in cities, many of them on river floodplains and low-lying coastal plains. With the rapid expansion of maritime and river-based trade, more and more people settled in strategic coastal locations that became important ports. Now the threat from the ocean increased dramatically, not because of rising sea levels, but from severe weather
events like hurricanes and tropical cyclones with their violent sea surges. Tsunamis generated by deep-sea earthquakes assumed much more menacing proportions once people had settled in crowded cities close to the shore. Human vulnerability to a potentially climbing ocean has increased dramatically because there are now so many of us—today seven billion and climbing—at a time when sea level rise has resumed.

The new era of rising sea levels dates from about 1860, the height of the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean is once again climbing inexorably. Without question, we humans have contributed to the accelerating warming of recent decades. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end—and the ascent’s end is unlikely to come in any of our lifetimes. We live in a very different world from even that of 1860, with tens of millions more people living in coastal cities or farming land only a few meters above sea level. Even a rise of a meter or so will inundate thousands of hectares of rice paddies and major international ports—this before one factors in the savage destruction wrought by sea surges or tsunamis. Our sheer numbers and profound dependence on cargoes transported on the ocean have raised our vulnerability to rising sea levels to a point at which we face agonizing and extremely expensive decisions about flood-control works, sea defenses, or relocation questions that humanity has never wrestled with before.

The Attacking Ocean
tells a tale of the increasing complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, whose responses to temperature changes and severe storms have changed but little. What has changed is us, and the number of us on earth.

LIKE MY OTHER BOOKS about ancient climate,
The Attacking Ocean
has many narratives and multiple story lines, for the tale covers fifteen millennia of human history, multiple continents, and a great variety of societies—ancient and modern, simple and complex. There is a somewhat chronological gradient in these pages, from earlier societies to later ones. Such an organization is a logical way to explore the tangled
history of sea level changes over the past fifteen thousand years, since post–Ice Age warming began. Once the stage is set in
chapter 1
, which describes how sea levels rise and introduces the dangers of tsunamis and other extreme events, I’ve divided the story into three parts. “Millennia of Dramatic Change” covers the rapid sea level changes between fifteen thousand years ago and 4000 B.C.E. and their impact on human societies. Chapters 2 to 4 take us from northern Europe to the Black Sea, the Nile valley, and Mesopotamia, through coastal landscapes changed dramatically by fast-climbing sea levels.
Chapter 2
brings out a persistent theme—that of the importance of marshes and wetlands to both hunters and subsistence farmers, for these borderlands act as dietary insurance when harvests fail or powerful storms attack low-lying coastlines. In
chapter 3
, we explore the major environmental changes that resulted from climbing shorelines in the Dardanelles Strait between Europe and Asia. We describe how rising sea levels caused the ponding of the Nile, which led to the creation of the Nile delta, one of the breadbaskets for the Egyptian state.
Chapter 4
examines the complex relationship between the early Mesopotamians and a Persian Gulf that turned from a gorge-bisected desert into an arm of the Arabian Sea in a few thousand years, with momentous consequences for humanity. Again, we return to wetlands, this time between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where the god Marduk “laid a reed on the face of the waters” and created one of the first civilizations.