Over the years I’ve had some very talented students who wrote these big novels in which the water never boiled. They were, essentially, entire books of exposition.

Lyell turned out to be right: the Scandinavian peninsula was, and still is, rising relative to the sea, as a result of the phenomenon known as “postglacial uplift”—the slow bounce-back of land that was long compressed by the great weight of earlier glaciers.

The quest to find a mean sea level for the whole world was part and parcel of the quest to make the world governable. And thus, von Hardenberg writes, did our idea of sea level as a benchmark emerge from a very specific time and place, becoming intertwined with the colonial project and “a long-held perception of holocenic stability.”

everything starts to matter because a context has arisen; expectations arise.

People sometimes marked these extremes with rocks that could stand as warnings for a future that was in danger of forgetting the past. We know them now as tsunami stones and hunger stones. A famous one in the Elbe, commemorating a terrible drought, is carved with the words “If you see me, then weep.”

the world is massively more connected now than it has ever been, naturally groupthink is on the rise

Parts of California’s Central Valley have fallen by nearly thirty feet as the aquifers beneath them have emptied, and areas of Louisiana, robbed of the Mississippi River sediment that once counteracted erosion, are sinking by as much as three-quarters of an inch per year.

A gravity anomaly in the Indian Ocean means that a large swath of its waters—an area nearly as large as India itself—has a top level that’s as much as a hundred and six metres lower than the global average.