Since ice is the key to the stability of the seas, the Atlantic Ocean is the key ocean to watch. Of the world’s three great oceans, the Atlantic sports by far the largest amount of ice. A glance at a map shows why the Atlantic is such a catchment area for polar cast-off ice and why the other two oceans are less so.
The Pacific’s connection with the Arctic, for instance, is pinched off by the sixty-mile-wide Bering Strait; and though the Bering Sea has plenty of winter floe ice, the glaciers of Alaska and Kamchatka and far northern Russia produce relatively little new ice as their gift to their local ocean. The South American Andes spill some icebergs into the South Pacific by way of Chile—though most of them melt into high-level lakes, from which rivers course principally through Argentina and into the Atlantic. The South Pacific then (technically, at least, though an atlas might suggest otherwise) barely connects to the Antarctic icefields at all—the frozen continent lies hundreds of miles to the south of where the delineators at the International Hydrographic Organization in Monaco declare the South Pacific to end. And the Indian Ocean, which is mostly a Southern Hemisphere ocean, has no physical connection to the Arctic either. It has a southern boundary that, just like the Pacific’s, ends many hundreds of miles shy of the Antarctic coastline.85 The South Pacific and the Indian Ocean seldom if ever see icebergs and seldom if ever sport ice floes, though of course the presence or absence of ice floes makes no difference, other than seasonally, to the level of the seas.
The Atlantic Ocean, by contrast, is powerfully and intimately linked to bitterly cold polar waters, as well as to lands that breed icebergs in huge numbers. Both in its far north and its far south, the Atlantic gets more than its fair share of solid and spectacular ice.
In winter the open waters of the North Atlantic are littered with icebergs, borne on the currents to the waters well to the south of Greenland—as the Titanic so disastrously came to know. The North Atlantic also becomes choked with ice around Iceland—as any Fleetwood fishing trawler that is sent out for cod in wintertime well knows, too. And there is an unbroken passage of wide sea north of Iceland that drives directly to the North Pole, unchecked by any land at all, allowing pack ice—with occasional trapped bergs from Arctic-bound glaciers—to drift into the ocean proper, there to be joined by thousands of Greenland icebergs.
But Greenland—the biggest noncontinental island in the world, currently home to fifty-seven thousand people and almost three million cubic kilometers (700,000 cubic miles) of ice—is the real key. All of its ice is currently melting or ablating, at varying rates, and hundreds of well-lubricated glaciers slither off the ice cap either directly down into the Atlantic from the island’s east coast or else indirectly, by way of the Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea, from the huge glaciers on its west.86 Greenland feeds new meltwater into the ocean without cease: it has become like a gigantic faucet turned on full blast, with the bath filling fast and no one on hand to turn the water off.
The Atlantic’s attraction for new ice is not a northern phenomenon alone: its southern waters are similarly specked with icebergs—thanks mainly to a peculiar accident of tectonics. A sunken mountain range known as the Antarctic Peninsula juts northward from that continent directly into the heart of the southern Atlantic—it almost reaches up the southern tip of South America. Then by a quirk of its geology, it swivels, as South America does also, until both headlands end up facing the east. Here the two sets of cliffs, with Cape Horn in Chile to the north, and the British possessions around Elephant Island to the south, help create the infamously lethal body of water known as the Drake Passage. On maps it resembles an iron-plate exit wound from an eastbound bullet: on the Pacific side the entry is smooth, but in the Atlantic the walls are bent upward untidily, looking like an immense and ragged-ended funnel in the sea apparently purpose-built for hosing materials into the deep ocean.
And hose them it surely does. Through the passage storms a cocktail of fierce westerly winds, immense currents of ice-cold water, and melting icebergs in prodigious quantities. These great citadels of ice are swept at impressive speeds directly into the southern Atlantic, making their way south of the Falkland Islands and close to the island groups of South Georgia and South Sandwich. Icebergs in the waters of the southern Atlantic are a danger that the few vessels steaming here regard with endless wariness. But more than that: from the moment they enter the water, they increase the level of the ocean. And if thousands, millions of them are poured into the sea from the land, the level of the sea would begin to notch up to accommodate them, millimeter by dangerous millimeter.
The presence of alien ice is thus very much an overwhelmingly Atlantic phenomenon—and with increasing air temperatures, the melting of the ice, and the rising of the sea, the sea-level problem is first and foremost an Atlantic problem too. The oceans are connected, of course—many oceanographers refer to the world ocean and regard the named seas more as inventions of mankind—and the Atlantic’s problem will become the world’s problem in very short order. But the symptoms of the change will be noticed—and are being noticed—in the Atlantic Ocean first.
One very large rise in the Atlantic’s level, a long while ago, led to social changes on the order of those which some fear today. About 8,700 years ago, during one of the many previous global warming periods, an ice barrier penning in the waters of Lake Agassiz, a huge glacial lake in what is now central Canada, broke apart. An immense quantity of freshwater—equivalent, some say, to fifteen Lake Superiors—coursed wildly into Hudson Bay and out into the open Atlantic. The ocean’s level rose more than one full meter in a matter of weeks. Archaeological evidence suggests, if somewhat tenuously, that the rise in sea level had effects all around the Northern Hemisphere, with farmers as far away as the Black Sea promptly leaving the coastline and moving to the much safer hillsides to begin tilling the soil, where, as it happened, hunter-gatherer cultures already existed. Tension, one imagines, swiftly resulted.
Elsewhere today there are similar signs of popular concern over the consequences of sea-level change and climate alteration. The government of the Maldive Islands received a great deal of press attention in 2009 for holding a cabinet meeting underwater, with all its ministers wearing frogmen’s suits, to demonstrate their vulnerability to a rise in water levels, even though they will be far smaller than the changes that followed the Agassiz flood;87 the government of Nepal held a similarly well-advertised meeting at Everest Base Camp to illustrate how the melting snows and icefields of the Himalayas were ruining the country’s crops and flooding its villages. Generally, though, the first to feel the effects of the ice melting will be those living in and around the Atlantic. There may be no modern-day equivalent of an ice-dam collapse imminently expected, but other changes—the weakening of the Gulf Stream and the gravitational effects of being close to the North Pole among them—are conspiring to make the sea-level rises in the North Atlantic even more impressive, and the response of those who live beside the sea commensurately so as well.
Take the port of Rotterdam. Take Holland, indeed. Take, in fact, all of the Netherlands. Perhaps no country anywhere around the Atlantic is so bound up with the sea—a quarter of it is below sea level (the Dutch word Nederland meaning low-lying land), and ever since the 1920s reclamation and the construction of dykes and dams and flood control measures, and the polders—the reclaimed land—they protect have been central to the making of the country, literally so. So crucial to the nation’s existence is the protection of the polders that a model of politics has been created to recognize it: the Polder Model is shorthand for consensus politics—that no matter how profoundly you might differ on other issues, if anything threatens the polders, all Dutchmen know that arguments cease, as the integrity of the polders comes first.
Catastrophic storms mark the remembered dates of Netherlands history much as wars of liberation and the reigns of king do so in other, drier lands. So while America has her 1776 and 1865 and 1941, and while Britain has 1066 and 1688 and 1914, the Netherlands has h
er 1170 (the All-Saints Flood, when the Zuider Zee first became salty), 1362 (when the Great Drowning of Men occurred, with twenty-five thousand people swept away by an immense storm surge), 1703 (the fantastically lethal Great Storm, which also affected England, and stirred Daniel Defoe to write a book about it), and 1916 (when the concerted nationwide attempt to stanch that winter’s inflow of North Sea waters—an attempt that continues to this day—was first launched). There were appalling storms in January and February 1953, too—a spring tide and a northwesterly wind combined to whip up the seas and breach the dykes and seawalls and drown nearly two thousand people. The reconstruction in the years that have followed have made the Dutch population determined that no such thing ever happen again.
Which is why the Netherlands, above all others, is currently moving fast to ensure that the rising ocean beyond its massive seawalls does not wash the nation out of existence. Maps are now published that show how deeply the country would be inundated—if no precautions were taken—by only a modest rise in sea levels. If the ocean were to rise by a single meter, almost the entire Dutch coast, from the German port of Bremerhaven in the north to the French channel port of Calais in the south, would be at risk of flooding. Floodwaters would extend miles inland, as far as the cities Breda, Utrecht, and Bremen. Half of the country’s fields would be salt-water-logged and unusable. Tides would wash in and out of great Dutch cities like Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam.
But the Dutch are not going to allow any such thing to happen. Sea defenses—enormous movable lock gates and barrages—that protect the polders and prevent storm surges from moving up rivers are of course being strengthened and their levels raised. But the major cities are doing rather more—with Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port, and a city of seven million, much of which lies below sea level even now, in the forefront. The city fathers have decided that rather than fight the incoming waters, they would be better advised to create a long-term ability to live with them—accommodating the waters to create a kind of new northern Venice, and making sure that with clever engineering, they keep this one from sinking.
And so they are encouraging the deepening of existing canals and the widening of existing rivers; they are building enormous water storage tanks beneath all new office blocks and parking lots; they are encouraging the making of grass roofs and enormous and endlessly thirsty public gardens; they are creating children’s parks that are designed to be usable in dry weather, but which can be instantly transformed into shallow lakes for water sports when it rains or when the tides turn nasty; they are extending the great shipping docks and container terminals farther downstream along the Rhine and the Meuse, and in perhaps the most obviously sensible accommodation to the predicted new water levels, they are building in the old docks large numbers of structures that float. Just for now there are experimental pavilions being built on top of pontoons; before long, say the burghers, there will be housing estates and shopping malls, all floating gaily on the waters, no matter how high they rise.
Most other great cities are more conservative in outlook and more strapped for cash, and are simply throwing up modern versions of defensive earthworks. London, sitting uncomfortably in its basin of clay, will be affected mightily by the rising seas, but has not yet ventured into the kind of experimental water world that Rotterdam is planning. It expects its estuary towns all to be fully awash, it worries about its nearby atomic power stations—almost all of which are built beside the sea because of their need for cooling water—and it frets about water flooding into the underground railway system. But it is doing little—it can afford to do little, and has in any case lost the bold infrastructural vision of a century before—and may suffer more than most. The only defense London has now is the Thames Barrier, still a wildly futuristic-looking array of movable submerged gates and plates placed across the river at Greenwich. Designed in the 1970s to hold back storm surges, it has been raised more than a hundred times since it was built, and the rising of sea levels means it is sure to be raised with much greater frequency in the near future. But then what? When the barrier was constructed, the rate of sea-level rise was both constant and predictable; now it is accelerating, and there is less and less predictability about how the water at the river’s mouth will behave. There is talk about a new barrier and what happens if none is in fact built. Lurid images are being published showing the Houses of Parliament awash, substations at Canary Wharf in a riot of short-circuiting sparks, the dean of St. Paul’s splodging down the nave in his rubber boots, and the wheel of the London Eye reflected in its own lagoon. The city, already a byword for urban damp, is suddenly alarmed at the prospect of evolving into London-on-Sea, with all that implies.
New York, too, is thinking on similar defensive lines. Unlike London, it sits on stable geological features that rise well above sea level—but it was tunneled into and bored through until it resembled an ants’ nest, and all the tunnels lie well below sea level. A storm surge coming into New York harbor could flood the subway lines without difficulty—even now huge pumps remove fourteen million gallons of seepage from the tracks and tunnels every day. But far more goes on underground than subways: the telecommunications cables and fiber-optic lines alone are vital for the running of the world’s financial industries: soak them in the water and the world starts to fall apart. Small wonder the authorities have begun buying new pumps and creating new and hidden drainage schemes to keep the water away from all the high-technology equipment belowground; and new committees of specialists are sprouting like mushrooms, all bent on keeping New York from drowning on the day when the big water comes.
The city has nearly six hundred miles of shoreline, and since climate modelers believe that for technical reasons the Northeast of the United States will suffer rather greater sea-level rises than elsewhere if the Greenland glaciers melt quickly, these miles are suddenly being regarded as very vulnerable indeed. So from Paramus to Elizabeth, from Raritan Bay to Throgs Neck, plans for strengthening the docks and anchorages are being laid, emergency evacuation plans are being dusted off—and plans to build two huge flood barriers are being openly discussed. One would be sited a few hundred yards on the seaward side of the Verrazano Bridge, while the other would stand across the entrance to the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. Engineers have already worked out their costs and the benefits: the politicians, though, are still waiting to be convinced.
There are currently some forty climate-change-related construction schemes under way in oceanside cities around the world, most of them in the Atlantic. Central to all of these preparations—whether they are advanced or not, whether they incorporate revolutionary designs or not, whether they are likely to work or not—is the assumption that the worst will happen to each city when the weather gets bad. The climate experts in all of these cities loudly assert that the weather is already getting bad—that as the world warms, as the ice melts and as the sea levels rise, so, and by way of a series of complicated physical changes that are still not wholly understood, is the weather becoming dramatically worse as well.
So the vulnerable cities are not merely going to slide slowly and elegantly under the sea, millimeter by millimeter. They are going to perch on the edge of inundation until a winter’s night some years or decades hence, when the a storm rages itself into an uncontrollable maelstrom of fury, and a battering of huge waves breaches the dykes and the levees, and water courses into the city center in torrents, destroying all before it. Violent weather, added to higher water, turns an alarming development into a serially lethal one. And violent weather, it is said, is becoming much more common.
4. HERE IS THE WEATHER FORECAST
But is it? Is the Atlantic weather changing? Are there now climatic reasons for supposing that the ocean, much abused, is about to wreak its sweet revenge? We may pride ourselves in our modern sophistication—but the very fact that we ask such a question, that we are now so anxious, so mired in self-recrimination, transports us back to much the same level as the May
ans and the Caribs, who asked exactly the same questions centuries ago. Are we making the gods angry? was the question they asked. Is the ocean striking back at us? we inquire nervously today.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that something meteorologically untoward may be happening. In 2009, in the beach surf off Rio de Janeiro, for instance, there were sightings of Magellanic penguins, borne two thousand miles north from their customary homes in Patagonia. That caused much alarm and puzzlement. Biologists summoned to their aid thought they must have been following shoals of anchovies that had been swept north by changing currents and winds: Brazilian newspapers reported with incredulity the sight of bikini-clad young sunbathers carrying the creatures home to their refrigerators, with both women and birds frightened and helpless (and the penguins dying).
On the other side of the sea, and in another hemisphere, the impoverished republic of Liberia has recently suffered wave after wave of storms that have begun gnawing away the country’s coast, causing hundreds of houses in some small communities to tumble into the sea and vanish. One larger town named Buchanan88 recently appealed for funds to start building seawalls to halt the encroachment. The Liberian government has warned that unless the international community helps, the town and many like it will have to watch helplessly as streets are inundated and its people are forced to move inland, and that the country will be compelled to alter its very shape in order to accommodate the changing sea.
Then again, in Denmark there are other strange symptoms: the average national wind speeds appear to be gathering up, and in the Danish countryside sales of wind turbines are reported to be climbing because the more frequent gales seem suddenly so commercially alluring. In Cape Town huge forest fires have raged close to the city center, and the country’s national flower, the King Protea, has been almost wiped out locally, as has its chief pollinator, the sugarbird. The violent rainstorms that doused such blazes a decade ago now no longer happen: the weather in the Eastern Cape has changed, say the locals: the seasons, one was quoted by the BBC as saying, have run amok.
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