Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”

As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors

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A variety of factors are driving the “land-loss crisis,” as it’s come to be called. But the essential one is a marvel of engineering. What leaping carp are to Chicagoland, sunken fields are to the parishes around New Orleans—evidence of a man-made natural disaster. Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manag

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“As climactic change begins to affect long-range strategic planning for human survival, as the Earth's stocks of pelagic food fish plummet, as dry-land aquifers are drained, we can easily believe we've been shortsighted in a loss of intimacy with place, in largely ignoring the impact geography has on our daily lives.” Barry Lopez from embrace fearl

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