Ancient Stories of Sea Level Rise

December 14, 2022 7:14 PM

Geographer and geologist collecting oral literature of indigenous peoples tells of stories of sea-level rise at least 7,000 years old.
posted by NotLost (19 comments total)

oral literature

*twitch*
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:17 PM on December 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think this is a more direct link.

Interesting, but the ending gives me pause. It could use more "profound adaptations in order to survive" and less "the sky is not falling."
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:35 PM on December 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think this is a more direct link.

Thanks. I will ask the mods to replace my link with yours.
posted by NotLost at 7:44 PM on December 14, 2022

"who don't necessarily speak very much English, but nonetheless have a vast amount of information that they store in their heads" is the point where I stopped reading.
posted by B3taCatScan at 8:44 PM on December 14, 2022

I read that as "and therefore were overlooked", not "can you believe it?"
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:00 PM on December 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've researched this phenomenon on coastal BC - in Haida Gwaii there is pretty convincing evidence for oral narratives describing the environment as we know it was 14,000 years ago, when it was very different than now. Blog snippet but there's much more to say.
posted by Rumple at 10:10 PM on December 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

OMG did Bruce Chatwin return from the dead?

The knowledge they speak of is true and alive. But fuck me sideways if they aren't dicks about it. 'Chinese whispers... ' indeed.

Yet if anyone doubts that accurate factual information can be transmitted orally down through hundreds of generations... get thee to a memory palace (and could this old continent with the oldest culture on earth be anything but...?).
posted by Thella at 11:43 PM on December 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Interesting, but the ending gives me pause. It could use more "profound adaptations in order to survive" and less "the sky is not falling."

Humans will survive. Capitalism will not.
posted by Thella at 11:46 PM on December 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Homeric poems survived the Bronze Age collapse. There is knowledge in poetry and songs.
posted by mumimor at 8:02 AM on December 15, 2022

So all those Creationist types might be right about something?
posted by Ideefixe at 10:19 AM on December 15, 2022

So all those Creationist types might be right about something?

They were right in that there was flooding from the ending of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But I wouldn't bank on any extrapolations they make from that.

I am perplexed by some people's lack of belief in an extended oral knowledge system. It's pretty well proven in Australia. How else could people survive for tens of millenia? Every generation could not invent the wheel in terms of medicines and foods (turning toxic into nutrition), or finding their way from one side of the continent to the other. They build their lives on the knowledge handed down through narratives. There are even procedures to ensure that the knowledge is transmitted accurately.
posted by Thella at 12:49 PM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's true sea level rise erased much of our anthropological record, which maybe informs us somehow, given sea level rise shall erase many of our civilization's artifacts too.

As for the end bit, it's clear sea level rise was never the scary part of climate change. It's floods and droughts that scare people now, including fires. It's famines, and the diseases they create, that'll terrify people in the 2040s. It'll be famine consequences and heat stroke or similar that cut the world population below one billion by the early 2100s, ala Will Steffen's projections.

“Our data is actual human subject data and shows that the critical wet-bulb temperature is closer to 31.5°C”
posted by jeffburdges at 12:06 PM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

it's clear sea level rise was never the scary part of climate change

Not to argue against the rest of your point, but 40% of the population of the US lives in a coastal area. Sea level rise is terrifying, and we have not at all digested its implications.
posted by mittens at 3:49 PM on December 17, 2022

We'll wind up +70m over the long term, but that'll take centuries. As I understand, we'd have +65 cm by 2100 at current rates, more in some areas like the NE US, but it's accelerating so really we'll have "several" meters by 2100, right? I've never heard projections above like +5m for the lifetimes of anyone alive today though. I'd expect increased storm intensity causes vastly more damage over the next 40 years, no?

Any idea how a few centimeters of sea level rise causes erosion and building collapses in Miami? I've never understood that process, which leaves me suspicious their own water table exploitation maybe plays some big role.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:20 PM on December 18, 2022

As say NYC at +2.4 m sea level happen late this century, and we'll lack oil for building dikes by then, perhaps the largest impact would simply be coastal property values increasingly representing "rent" not "assets", which collapses those values and disrupting the ponzi interest flows.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:51 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's about 20 ft. (6.1 meters) of potential sea level rise locked up in the ice on top of Greenland, and very recent work shows that the glaciers of Greenland are melting about 100 times faster than people had believed through estimates from models based on glaciers in Antarctica.
posted by jamjam at 5:31 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have trouble thinking about it, really. So, in the FPP, they're interviewing geographer Patrick Nunn; Nunn's colleague, linguist Nicholas Reid, says this about the Australian geomyths: “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.” (quoted from Jeff Goodell's The Water Will Come, which I cannot recommend enough.)

And these were people who could pick up and move. There were no beach-side hotels, no apartment buildings, no docks, no military bases. Was it terrifying, to watch the ocean take over the land you were used to living on, or was resilience, a pick-up-and-go attitude, baked into the lifestyle? (You can sort of set this thought next to spamandkimchi's wonderful FPP today, which includes a piece on Lagos, where a way of making a life on the water, creating structures that are able to be reassembled, traveling by boat, is in desperate, bloody conflict with a futuristic vision of the city where climate resilience involves massive development, huge architectural feats.)

The problem with sea level rise gets obscured a little, I think, by all the numbers in projections. Are we talking about 2050 or 2100, are we talking about half a meter, multiple meters? How many hundreds of thousands of people displaced, how many trillions of dollars in repairs? It sounds so academic, so distant, which is weird, because it's literally happening right now, and already we cannot afford to repair what's happening. (I'm preaching to the choir, I know, but bear with me because I apparently can't stop thinking and talking about this.)

I stare at this interactive map of sea level rise more than is strictly healthy. Like, if you set aside measurements, and just zoom in on towns, on port cities, you get some kind of idea of the enormity of what we're talking about. 2100 is in the not-too-distant future, but we're not exactly saving up the rise so that it all rolls in on January 1, 2100. Long before 2100, we will see cities damaged beyond what we're able to afford. Our ability to insure against floods will simply cease. But migration will be limited to those who can afford it--those who can't afford it...where do they go? What do you do, if all your wealth is in the value of your home, and the bottom falls out of that value because your town is now in a constant state of flooding? (And what happens to communities that depend on property tax for revenue?) And even for cities that intend to fight the sea, who will make the choices of who gets to survive? Will Miami devote its climate-adaptation architecture to its poor neighborhoods, or its rich ones? (Miami is fascinating in the relationship between its development and the ocean, and I have been scrambling to try to find an FPP we had on it a year or two ago, unsuccessfully.)

And anyway, that's all just the US. Mumbai certainly doesn't have until 2100. Will their climate plan be enough?

We can think pretty easily about what should happen in any one city, but the sea level affects so many places, but not in tandem, not all at exactly the same time, and what I haven't seen in any of my obsessive reading about this, is any notion that there is a way of thinking through a disaster of this scale. We don't have an economics of it, a politics of it. We simply aren't used to thinking this big. We don't even have a story yet, we are still so early in talking about it that we haven't developed our own set of geomyths to contextualize and give meaning to what's happening.
posted by mittens at 6:21 PM on December 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Around pick-up-and-go attitude, I've once met this amazing guy who spent years sleeping rough in actual semi-wilderness, not cities, while dragging around his laptop and doing IT work remotely.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:54 PM on December 18, 2022

Years ago it occurred to me that the water from melting ice usually runs off somewhere rather than continuing to hang around with the cooler kids, and that such a redistribution of mass should be reflected in changes to the Earth's spin rate and day length. And since our clocks can easily detect changes in those quantities caused by mere tropical storms, we should be able to look at sea level rise without making thousands of fiddly measurements in the chaos of coastlines all over the world.

At first I thought meltwater from the poles would tend to make its way toward the Equator, and despite countervailing influence from melting glaciers in the Andes (the so called 'third pole') and possibly from the Himalayas, Earth's rotation would tend to slow down and the days would lengthen as the ice melted.

But then I ran into an article by an authority on the subject who said melting poles would speed the rotation up because all that ice was squishing the Earth into a more oblate shape and as the Earth restored itself it would spin faster.

So, I don’t know. Maybe there's a case to be made that it’s very unlikely that all the various effects would cancel each other out exactly, and that what we should be looking for is an acceleration of changes in the spin rate no matter in what direction, but that doesn’t seem to lend itself as readily to a straightforward calculation of how much ice is melting.

Still, it caught my attention last summer when we abruptly recorded the two shortest days in the atomic clock era in a context of generally increasing day length, as witness all those leap seconds.

I don’t know what that means, if anything, but it has increased my sense of foreboding.
posted by jamjam at 5:44 PM on December 20, 2022