The Attacking Ocean
The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The past fifteen thousand years-the entire span of human civilization-have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when coastlines were more than seven hundred feet below modern levels. Over the next ten millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because those people were able to adjust readily to new coastlines.
Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago, except for local adjustments that caused often significant changes to places such as the Nile Delta. The curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The earth's population boomed, quintupling from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution. The threat from the oceans increased with our crowding along shores to live, fish, and trade.
Since 1860, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean's climb has accelerated. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end. The Attacking Ocean, from celebrated author Brian Fagan, tells a tale of the rising complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, which have changed little. What has changed is us, and the number of us on earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Data pulled from a diverse base of geological studies, archaeological finds, historical documentation, and modern reporting ground this broad and accessible survey of the interaction between rising sea levels and humanity over the past 9,000 years. Fagan, an emeritus professor of anthropology at U.C. Santa Barbara, explains that since the dawn of human society, people have struggled to reconcile the ocean's value with its destructiveness, yet he argues that the modern tendency to build dense metropolises in coastal areas leaves us "vulnerable to the ocean and its whims in ways unimaginable even one or two centuries ago," and creates situations where one-time disasters like Hurricane Sandy and chronic issues like rising sea levels in Bangladesh lead to environmental refugee crises, "not as an abstract problem for the future, but as a sobering reality." Alternate tables of contents allow readers to explore the material chronologically or geographically, and each chapter is both self-contained and intimately connected to the grander narrative. Fagan (Cro-Magnon) compellingly urges individuals and governments to realize that the rising sea level is an increasingly urgent problem, and the development of sustainable solutions should be at the forefront of public discourse. Unlike our less populous ancestors, we no longer have the luxury of simply moving to higher ground.
