The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

and higher, and by about 5600 BCE, it had risen to a point where it was 500 feet above the Black Sea. Then the strip of land between them collapsed, and the seawater flowed over it. So much water poured in so fast it cut a flume—now the Bosporus Strait—280 feet wide and 450 feet deep. Ryan and Pitman calculated that ten cubic miles of water rushed

Gilgamesh, as well as the later Noah flood story, are based on a real event that occurred in the Black Sea about seven thousand years ago, when the seas were still rising at the end of the last ice age. At the time, the Black Sea was an isolated freshwater lake, cut off from the Mediterranean Sea by a high, narrow strip of land in what is now Turke

If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.

After the end of the last ice age, there is evidence that the water rose about thirteen feet in a single century. If that were to occur again, it would be a catastrophe for coastal cities around the world, causing hundreds of millions of people to flee from the coastlines and submerging trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate and infrastructure.

Today, seas are rising at more than twice the rate they did in the last century. As warming of the Earth increases and the ice sheets begin to feel the heat, the rate of sea-level rise is likely to increase rapidly.

(about half of the recorded sea-level rise in the twentieth century came from the expansion of the warming oceans).