(1) A layperson’s account: Mark Maslin, “The Climatic Rollercoaster” in The Complete Ice Age, ed. Brian Fagan (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 62–91.
(2) Brian Fagan, Beyond the Blue Horizon (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), chap. 2.
(3) Eustacy and isostasy are well described by Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young, The Rising Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 31ff.
(4) Pilkey and Young, Rising Sea, 35ff.
(5) Pilkey and Young, Rising Sea, 79.
(6) Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 212ff, discusses rising sea levels.
(7) The TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, which functioned between 1992 and 2006, was a joint project by French and American scientists. The satellite measured the surface topography and height of the oceans.
(8) Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Viking, 2008). Parker, The Power, 133ff, also has a vivid description. See also the eyewitness accounts by various writers who were in affected places at the time of the earthquake, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 49 (1756): 398–444.
(9) Quoted by Parker, The Power, 134.
(10) Parker, The Power, 135.
(11) Parker, The Power, 136–42, has an excellent description of tsunamis.
(12) Stein Bondevik et al., “Record-Breaking Height for 6,000-Year-Old Tsunami in the North Atlantic,” EOS 84, no. 31 (2003): 298, 293.
(13) A huge literature surrounds this epochal disaster. The most accessible description of Akrotiri: Christos Doumas, Thera: Pompeii of the Aegean (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).
(14) Plato, and Desmond Lee, trans., Timaeus and Critias (London: SMK Books, 2010), 25c–d.
(15) Thucydides, and Richard Crawley, trans., History of the Peloponnesian War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), book 3:89: 2–5. Accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.3.third.html.
(16) Simon Winchester, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
(1) I’m grateful to Professor Peter Rowly-Conwy of Durham University for his advice on this point.
(1) M. C. Burkitt, “Maglemose Harpoon Dredged Up from the North Sea,” Man 239 (1932): 96–102. See also J. G. D. Clark, The Mesolithic Age in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 125.
(2) This chapter draws heavily on Vincent Gaffney, S. Fitch, and D. Smith, Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2009).
(3) For an analysis of Reid’s work, see Gaffney et al., Europe’s Lost World, 3–13.
(4) Quoted from Gaffney et al., Europe’s Lost World, 3.
(5) Clement Reid, Submerged Forests (Oxford: Cambridge Series of Manuals of Literature and Science, 1913). Quote from p. 5.
(6) Reid, Submerged, 120.
(7) J. G. D. Clark, The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Clark ably summarizes the latest pollen research of the day.
(8) Bryony J. Coles, “Doggerland: A Speculative Survey,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 64 (1998): 45–81.
(9) A general summary of these developments: T. Douglas Price, “The Mesolithic of Western Europe,” Journal of World Prehistory 1, no. 3 (1987): 225–305. See also the specialist essays in Geoff Bailey and Penny Spikins, eds., Mesolithic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
(10) The history of the Baltic Sea is summarized briefly at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoldia_Sea.
(11) This section is based on Gaffney et al., Europe’s Lost World, chaps. 3 and 4.
(12) The literature on Star Carr is proliferating rapidly as a result of new generations of research. J. G. D. Clark, Excavations at Star Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), is the classic account. Paul Mellars and Petra Dark, Star Carr in Context (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999), is an invaluable update, even if some of its conclusions are being modified by new and as yet unpublished research.
(13) Summarized by Steven J. Mithen, “The Mesolithic Age,” in Prehistoric Europe: An Illustrated History, ed. Barry Cunliffe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79–135.
(1) The collapse of Lake Agassiz was, of course, a much more complicated process than this, and its effect on the ocean conveyor belt is much debated. For the conveyor belt, see Wallace S. Broecker, “Chaotic Climate,” Scientific American, November 1995, 62–68.
(2) Graeme Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
(3) Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
(4) A popular account of this event: William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Subsequent research is questioning many details of the science. The connection with Noah’s flood is pure speculation and is discounted by most scholars (including me).
(5) Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book 2, line 5, 97.
(6) Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–50 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1987), 37.
(7) My accounts of ancient Egypt and the Nile are based on personal experience and on two basic sources: Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: The Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), and Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (New York: Random House, 2010).
(8) Wilkinson, The Rise, 24.
(9) An excellent description: H. J. Dumont, “A Description of the Nile Basin, and a Synopsis of Its History, Ecology, Biogeography, Hydrology, and Natural Resources,” in Dumont, The Nile: Origin, Environments, Limnology and Human Use, ed. H. J. Dumont (New York: Springer Science, 2009), 1–21. This section is also based on Daniel Jean Stanley and Andrew G. Warne, “Nile Delta: Recent Geological Evolution and Human Impact,” Science 260 (1993), 5108: 628–34. See also Waleed Hamza, “The Nile Delta,” in Dumont, The Nile, 75–94.
(10) Barker, The Agricultural Revolution, chap. 4, has an excellent summary.
(11) A short description of the site: Josef Eiwanger, “Merimde Beni-salame,” in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 501–5.
(12) Maadi: Béatrix Mident-Reynes, “The Naqada Period,” in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, ed. Ian Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57–60.
(13) Toby Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt (London: Routledge, 2001), has an excellent account of these developments.
(1) This quote comes from an elaborate introduction to an incantation recited in honor of Ezida, the temple of the god Nabu at Borsippa near Babylon. L. H. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation (San Francisco: Book Tree, 1999). Originally published in 1902, page 4 in the 1999 edition.
(2) This passage is based on Douglas J. Kennett and James P. Kennett, “Early State Formation in Southern Mesopotamia: Sea Levels, Shorelines, and Climate Change,” Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology 1 (2006): 67–99. See also Paul Sanlaville, “The Deltaic Complex of the Lower Mesopotamian Plain and Its Evolution Through Millennia,” in The Iraqi Marshlands: A Human and Environmental Study, ed. Emma Nicholson and Peter Clark (London: AMAR and Politico’s, 2006), 133–50.
(3) The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), known to sailors as the doldrums, is an area around the globe near the equator where winds originating in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres come together. Normally appearing as a bank of clouds, the north-south movements of the ITCZ have short- and long-term effects on rainfall in many equatorial nations.
(4) These paragraphs draw on Kennett and Kennett, “Early State Formation,” 79–85.
(5) Quoted from Gavin Young, Return to the Marshes: Life with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq (London: Collins, 1977), 42–43.
(6) Quote from Wilfred Thesiger, Desert, Marsh & Mountain (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), 106. For an assessment of the marsh ecosystem, see M. I. Evans, “The Ecosystem,” in Nicholson and Clark, Iraqi Marshlands, 201–19.
(7) Young, Return, 16.
(8) The classic account of the Marsh Arabs is Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (New York: Dutton, 1964), upon which the account of these people in this chapter is based. See also S. M. Salim, Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta (London: Athlone Press, 1962), and Edward L. Ochsenschlager, Iraq’s Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 2004).
(9) Samuel Kramer, The Sumerians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 77.
(10) Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1954), gives a popular account of the Ur discoveries.
(11) Woolley, Excavations, 34.
(12) Woolley, Excavations, 36.
(13) C. L. Woolley, ed., Ur Excavations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927–1946), 110–11.
(14) http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab1.htm
(15) King, The Seven Tablets, 4.
(1) This section is based on: R. T. J. Cappers and D. C. M. Raemaeker, “Cereal Cultivation at Swifterbant? Neolithic Wetland Farming on the North European Plain,” Current Anthropology 49 (2008): 385–402.
(2) Cappers and Raemaeker, “Cereal Cultivation,” 388–89.
(3) An extensive Dutch literature surrounds terpen. This passage is based on Annet Nieuwhof, “Living in a Dynamic Landscape: Prehistoric and Proto-Historic Occupation of the Northern-Netherlands Coastal Area,” in Science for Nature Conservation and Management: The Wadden Sea Ecosystem and EU Directives, H. Marencic et al., Proceedings of the 12th International Scientific Wadden Sea Symposium in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, 30 March–3 April 2009 (Wilhelmshaven: Wadden Sea Ecosystem No. 26, 2010), 174–78; also on Audrey M. Lambert, The Making of the Dutch Landscape: An Historical Geography of the Netherlands (New York: Seminar Press, 1971), 30–31. See also Jaap Boersma, “Dwelling Mounds in the Salt Marshes—The Terpen of Friesland and Groningen,” in The Prehistory of the Netherlands, ed. L. P. Louwe Kooijmans (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 57–560.
(4) Kooijmans, ed., The Prehistory of the Netherlands, 569.
(5) Gaius Plinius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–A.D. 79), was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, and also an army and naval commander. His multivolume Natural History summarized a lifetime of observations and became a model for many subsequent works. H. Rackham, trans. Pliny, De Historia Naturalis, vol. 14 (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1938), 1.
(6) William Jackson Brodribb, ed. and trans., The History of Tacitus, book 1 (London: Macmillan, 1898), 70. Publius Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 56–117) was a senator and historian of the Roman Empire. He wrote five works, of which Germania and the Histories are best known. Publius Vitellius was a commander under the Roman general Germanicus. Five years after the incident described by Tacitus, he successfully prosecuted the murderer of Germanicus, who died under suspicious circumstances in A.D. 19.
(7) This section is based on Stephen Rippon, The Transformation of Coastal Wetlands (London: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2000), 32–38.
(8) Rippon, The Transformation, 84–90.
(9) Rippon, The Transformation, 47.
(10) Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Part 3: A.D. 920–1014 Accessed at http://omacl.org/Anglo/part3.html.
(11) These paragraphs based on Lambert, The Making, 77–81.
(12) The Day of Judgment featured prominently in medieval homilies, like the Blickling Homily for Easter, quoted here, preached at a monastic house near Lincoln, England, some time in the late tenth or early eleventh century. Quoted from Michael Swanton, ed., Anglo-Saxon Prose (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 67–96.
(13) Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 62–63.
(14) Hubert Lamb and H. H. Lamb, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles, and Northwestern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), is the classic source on northern European storm surges.
(15) Lamb and Lamb, Historic Storms, 74.
(16) Parker, The Power, 63.
(17) Saltwater-saturated peat was dried, then burned, the ash then being soaked in more saltwater, and then filtered before being allowed to dry into small cakes. The resulting salt served to preserve herrings, as well as being used for other purposes.
(18) Lambert, The Making, 120–23.
(19) The word “polder,” a tract of land protected by dikes, was first used in about 1138 in Flanders.
(1) Homer, Samuel Butler, trans., The Iliad (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898), book XIV.
(2) Strabo, Geography, Horace Leonard Jones, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1929), book 8, 1: 31.
Recent research: John C. Kraft et al., “Harbor Areas at Ancient Troy: Sedimentology and Geomorphology Complement Homer’s Iliad,” Geology 31 (2003): 163–66.
(3) Scylax of Caryanda is said to have completed his Periplus in about 350 B.C.E. Quote in this paragraph from Elpida Hadjidaki, “Preliminary Report of Excavations in the Harbor of Phalasarna in West Crete,” American Journal of Archaeology 92, no. 4 (1988): 467, 468.
(4) Hadjidaki, “Preliminary Report,” 463–79.
(5) Strabo, Geography, book 9, 1.
(6) Jean-Philippe Goiranet et al., “Piraeus, the Ancient Island of Athens: Evidence from Holocene Sediments and Historical Archives,” Geology 39 (June 2011): 531–34.
(7) Nick Marriner et al., “Holocene Morphogenesis of Alexander the Great’s Isthmus at Tyre in Lebanon,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 22 (2007): 9218–23. Also: Nick Marriner et al., “Geoscience Rediscovers Phoenicia’s Buried Harbors,” Geology 34 (2006): 1–4.
(8) Eduard Reinhardt and Avner Raban, “The Tsunami of 13 December A.D. 115 and Destruction of Herod the Great’s Harbor at Caesarea Maritima, Israel,” Geology 34 (2006): 1061–64.
(9) David Blackman, “Ancient Harbours in the Mediterranean,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 11 (1982): 79ff.
(10) A first-rate website describes recent research at Ostia and reconstructs the harbors: www.ostia-antica.org/med/med.htm#bib.
(11) Pliny the Younger, P. G. Walsh, trans., Complete Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6, 31.
(12) A magisterial history of Venice: Roger Crowley, City of Fortune (New York: Random House, 2011).
(13) MOSE Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project.
(14) Yeduda Bock et al., “Recent Subsidence of the Venice Lagoon from Continuous GPS and Inferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar,” Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems, 10.1029/2011 (2012).
(1) Gavin Kelly, Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 141.
(2) Franck Goddio et al., Alexandria: The Submerged Royal Quarters (London: Periplus Publishing, 1998), also Cleopatra’s Palace: In Search of a Legend (New York: Discovery Books, 1998). See also http://franckgoddio.org.
(3) Franck Goddio et al., Underwater Archaeology in the Canopic Region in Egypt: The Topography and Excavation of Heraklion-Thonis and East Canopus (Oxford: Center for Maritime Archaeology, 2007).
(4) Athenaeus, C. D. Yonge, trans., Deipnosophistae (London: Henry Bohn, 1854), book 1, 33d. Athenaeus of Naukratis in the Egyptian delta was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian of the late second and early third centuries C.E. His Deipnosophistae, “dinner-table philosophers,” survives in fifteen books. He himself said he was the author of a treatise on fish, but it is lost.
(5) Patrick McGovern, Uncorking the Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 180–82 is the best guide.
(6) Tutankhamun’s wines: See Maria Rosa-Guasch-June et al., “First Evidence for White Wine from Ancient Egypt from Tutankhamun’s Tomb,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33, no. 8 (2006): 1075–80.
(7) Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: The Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 10.
(8) Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young, The Rising Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 101–116, has an excellent summary. Also Edward Maltby and Tom Barker, eds., The Wetlands Handbook (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
(9) Alan K. Bowman and Eugene L. Rogan, Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times (London: British Academy, 1999), 1–32.
(10) William Willcocks, The Nile Reservoir Dam at Assuan, and After, 2nd ed. (London: Spon and Chamberlain, 1903).
(11) A huge literature surrounds the High Dam, much it from the years after it was built. A popular account: Tom Little, High Dam at Aswan: The Subjugation of the Nile (New York: John Day, 1965).
(12) Daniel Jean Stanley and Andrew G. Warne, “Nile Delta: Recent Geological Evolution and Human Impact,” Science 260, no. 55108 (1993): 628–634. See also M. El Raey et al., “Adaptation to the Impacts of Sea Level Rise in Egypt,” Climate Research 12 (1999): 117–28.
(1) My description of Lothal is based on S. R. Rao, Lothal and the Indus Civilization (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1973). The reconstruction drawing in the frontispiece (see figure 8.1) is the basis for my scenario.
(2) The Harappan civilization is well described by Gregory Possehl, The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003). See also Jane R. McIntosh, The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2008).
(3) For a general description, see Brian Fagan, Beyond the Blue Horizon, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), Chap. 7.
(4) W. C. Schoff, ed. and trans., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Trade and Travel in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (London: Longmans, 1912). Quotes from chaps. 40 and 45, both of which are little more than a sentence.
(5) Cyclone summary: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_Indian_Ocean_cyclone_seasons.
(6) A harrowing description of this famine will be found in Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (Verso: New York, 2001), chaps. 1–3.
(7) Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chap. 3, summarizes some of the material in this passage.
(8) The Satapatha Brahmana (“Brahmana of one hundred paths”) is one of the prose texts describing the Vedic ritual, compiled between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. The mythological sections include legends of the creation and of a great flood.
(9) An authoritative account of this storm appears in J. E. Gastrell and Henry F. Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone of the 5th October 1864 (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1864). I also drew on Sir John Eliot, Handbook of Cyclonic Storms in the Bay of Bengal for the Use of Sailors (Calcutta: Meteorological Department of the Government of India, 1894), chap. 3.
(10) Quotes in these paragraphs from Eliot, Handbook, 143–44.
(11) Gastrell and Blanford, Report, 35.
(12) Gastrell and Blanford, Report, 38.
(13) Gastrell and Blanford, Report, 121.
(14) Eliot, Handbook, 151–62.
(15) Eliot, Handbook, 162.
(16) Well summarized at http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Bhola_cyclone, with numerous contemporary references.
(1) T. Healy et al., eds., Muddy Coasts of the World: Processes, Deposits, and Function, Proceedings in Marine Science 4 (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2002),
(2) Duncan A. Vaughan et al., “The Evolving Story of Rice Evolution,” Plant Science 174, no. 4 (2008): 394–408.
(3) These paragraphs are based on Li Liu et al., “The Earliest Rice Domestication in China,” Antiquity 81 (2007), 313 Accessed at http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/liuI/index.html.
(4) D. Q. Fuller et al., “Presumed Domestication? Evidence for Wild Rice Cultivation and Domestication in the Fifth Millennium BC of the Lower Yangtze Region,” Antiquity 8, no. 1 (2007): 116–31.
(5) Kwang-chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), covers this material. See chap. 4, 192–212.
(6) For the 1954 flood: http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=395&catid=10&subcatid=65.
(7) Flood intervals: Fengling Yu et al., “Analysis of Historical Floods on the Yangtze River, China: Characteristics and Explanations,” Geomorphology 113 (2009): 210–16.
(8) Li Liu and Xingcan Chen, State Formation in Early China (London: Duckworth, 2003), 116–88 was the source for these paragraphs.
(9) Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
(10) Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 1850–2010 (London: Routledge, 2009).
(11) Coco Liu and ClimateWire, “Shanghai Struggles to Save Itself from the Sea,” Scientific American, September 27, 2011. Accessed at www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shanghai-struggles-to-save-itself-from-east-china-sea.
See also B. Wang et al., “Potential Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on the Shanghai Area,” Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue 14 (1998): 151–66. Zhongyuan Chen and Daniel Jean Stanley, “Sea-Level Rise on Eastern China’s Yangtze Delta,” Journal of Coastal Research 14, no. 1 (1998): 360–66.
(12) Quanlong Wei, Land Subsidence and Water Management in Shanghai (Delft, Netherlands: MA Thesis, Delft University of Technology, 2006). Accessed at http://www.curnet.nl/upload/documents/3BW/Publicaties/Wei.pdf.
(13) The literature is enormous. For a summary of the Three Gorges Dam and its potential consequences, see: http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/356?gclid=CKfbmsr8tK8CFYZgTAodo394HA.
(1) The Nihon is an officially commissioned history, completed in 901 C.E. Its fifty volumes cover the years 858–887. This detailed history is only in Japanese, but a general account of the tsunami of 869 appears in Kenneth Chang, “Blindsided by Ferocity Unleashed by a Fault,” New York Times, March 21, 2011.
(2) Bruce Parker, The Power of the Sea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 136–142.
(3) Junko Habu, Ancient Jomon of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) was the source for my description of Jomon, which is surrounded by an enormous literature.
(4) Habu, Ancient Jomon, 72–76.
(5) All of this was time consuming; witness the experience of California Indians. A California anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, found that 2.72 kilograms of pounded acorns processed by a Native American woman became 2.45 pounds of meal. Leaching this sample took just under four hours, about one and three quarter hours per kilogram. Jomon processing would probably have consumed as much time. See Walter Goldschmidt, “Nomlaki Ethnography,” University of California Publications in American Anthropology and Ethnology 42, no. 4 (1951): 303–443.
(6) Simon Kaner, “Surviving the Tsunami: Archaeological Sites of Northeastern Japan,” Current World Archaeology 49, no. 5, 1 (2011): 25–35.
(7) David Bressan, “Historic Tsunamis in Japan,” History of Geology, March 17, 2011. Accessed at http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/03/historic-tsunamis-in-japan.html.
(8) Nobuo Shuto, “A Century of Countermeasures Against Storm Surges and Tsunamis in Japan,” Journal of Disaster Research 2, no. 1 (2007): 19–26.
(9) For a discussion of sea defenses and the 2011 tsunami, see Norimitsu Onishi, “Seawalls Offered Little Protection Against Tsunami’s Crushing Waves,” New York Times, March 13, 2011.
(10) The media coverage was enormous. A useful summary that is adequate for our purposes appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tohoku_earthquake_and_tsunami.
(11) My account is based on Bruce Parker’s superb analysis: Power of the Sea, chaps. 8 and 9.
(1) A blow-by-blow description of the founding of Bangladesh and the 1970 cyclone appears in Archer K. Blood, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2002).
(2) http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Bangladesh_cyclone.
(3) An excellent summary appears in Climate Change Case Studies, May 2009. Accessed at http://wvasiapacific.org/downloads/case-studies/Bangladesh_Cyclone_Sidr_Response.pdf.
(4) M. L. Parry et al., IPCC Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
(5) Golam Mahabub Sarwar, Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the Coastal Zone of Bangladesh (Lund, Netherlands: Lund University International Masters Program in Environmental Science, MA Thesis, 2005).
(6) IRIN Report 11.14.2011: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=75094, “BANGLADESH: Rising sea level threatens agriculture.”
(7) R. Chabra, Soil Salinity and Water Quality (Brookfield, VT: A.A. Balkema, 1996).
(8) IRIN Report 11.14.2011.
(9) This section is based on Edmund Penning-Rowsell et al., Migration and Global Environmental Change CS4: Population Movement in Response to Climate-Related Hazards in Bangladesh: The “Last Resort” (London: Government Office on Science: Foresight Project on Global Environmental Migration, 2011). Accessed at http://www.icimod.org/?q=630.
(1) Robert McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), offers an excellent general introduction to the archaeology of the far north.
(2) Owen Mason, “The Contest Between the Ipiutak, Old Bering Sea, and Birnik Polities and the Origin of Whaling During the First Millennium AD Along Bering Strait,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17, no. 3 (1998): 240–325. Quote from p. 256.
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_island.
(4) Owen Mason et al., Living with the Coast of Alaska (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). I drew on chaps. 9 and 10 in writing descriptions of Shishmaref and Naknek. For the former, see also Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young, The Rising Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 7–16.
(5) For early settlement of the Pacific, see Patrick Kirch, On the Road of the Winds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Patrick D. Nunn, Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific During the Last Millennium (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), offers a general description of environmental change in the Pacific, which I drew on for these sections.
(6) Tuvalu: http://www.tuvaluislands.com. See also http://www.islandvulnerability.org/tuvalu.html.
(7) Kiribati: http://www.kiribatitourism.gov.ki. For climate change, the government’s official climate change site is useful: http://www.climate.gov.ki.
(8) Alliance of Small Island States: http://aosis.info.
(9) Xavier Romero-Frias, The Maldive Islanders: A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom (Barcelona: Nova Ethnographia Indica, 2003).
(10) Quoted from Pilkey and Young, The Rising Sea, 20–21.
(11) Pilkey and Young, The Rising Sea, See also Adam Hadhazy, “The Maldives, Threatened by Drowning Due to Climate Change, Set to Go Carbon-Neutral,” Scientific American, March 16, 2009. Accessed at http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=maldives-drowning-carbon-neutral-by-2009-03-16.
(12) See the United Nations Development Program for the Maldives: http://www.undp.org.mv/v2/?lid=171.
(1) Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: Osgood, 1883), chap. 1, 1.
(2) The literature is diffuse and specialized. See Janet Rafferty and Evan Peacock, eds., Times River: Archaeological Syntheses from the Lower Mississippi River Valley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). The chapter by Carl P. Lipo and Robert C. Dunnell, “Prehistoric Settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 125–67, is especially relevant. Poverty Point: Jon L. Gibson, The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point: Place of Rings (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004).
(3) Tristram R. Kidder, “Climate Change and the Archaic to Woodland Transition (3000–2500 Cal B.P.) in the Mississippi River Basin,” American Antiquity 71, no. 2 (2006): 195–231.
(4) This historical passage is based on John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 31ff, also 58ff. For an entertaining and often sparkling history of the Mississippi valley before the Army Corps of Engineers: Lee Sandlin, Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
(5) McPhee, The Control of Nature, 57.
(6) McPhee, The Control of Nature, 58.
(7) A. Baldwin Wood (1879–1956) as an inventor and engineer. His highly efficient, low-maintenance pumps drained, and still drain, much of New Orleans and have also been widely used elsewhere, including in the drainage of the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands.
(8) Discussion of Morgan City based on McPhee, The Control of Nature, 78ff.
(9) Inevitably, Hurricane Katrina has generated an enormous popular and academic literature. A fascinating film review essay is worth reading to get the flavor of the controversies. Nicholas Lemann, “The New New Orleans,” New York Review of Books, March 24, 2011. A recent very solid account: James Patterson Smith, Hurricane Katrina: The Mississippi Story (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
(10) Migration: Susan L. Cutter et al., “The Katrina Exodus: Internal Displacements and Unequal Outcomes” (London: Government Science Office: Foresight Migration and Global Environment Project, 2011), Case Study 1.
(11) Lehmann, “The New New Orleans,” 47.
(1) Guntram Riecken, “Die Flutkatastrophe am 11. Oktober 1634—Ursachen, Schäden und Auswirkungen auf die Küstengestalt Nordfrieslands,” in Flutkatastrophe 1634: Natur, Geschichte, Dichtung, 2nd ed., ed. Boy Hinrichs, Albert Panten, and Guntram Riecken (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1991), 11–64. Quote from p. 35.
(2) Quotes in this paragraph from Riecken, “Die Flutkatastrophe,” 11–12.
(3) Quoted from http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burchardi_flood, where a general account of the disaster may be found, with primary references.
(4) This passage is based on Audrey M. Lambert, The Making of the Dutch Landscape: An Historical Geography of the Netherlands (New York, Academic Press), 94–102.
(5) Based on Lambert, The Making, 210–12.
(6) William the Silent, Prince of Orange (1533–1584), was a wealthy nobleman who rebelled against the Spanish. The Dutch revolt triggered the Eighty Years’ War that ended in independence for the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in 1581, which ultimately became the Netherlands. He was assassinated in 1584.
(7) Quoted from Lambert, The Making, 213.
(8) Lambert, The Making, 213–15.
(9) Lambert, The Making, 215–17.
(10) Lambert, The Making, 218, 220.
(11) This passage is based on Lambert, The Making, 239–41.
(12) A. G. Maris, M. Dendermonde, and H. A. M. C. Dibbits, The Dutch and Their Dikes (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1956), 66.
(13) Lambert, The Making, 266–69.
(14) www.deltawerken.com/Zuider-Zee-flood-(1916)/306.html.
(15) For the British disaster, see Hilda Grieve, The Great Tide: The Story of the 1953 Flood Disaster in Essex (Colchester: Essex County Council, 1959). A summary of the Netherlands story appears at www.deltawerken.com/89.
(16) This account and quote based on personal observation, www.deltawerken.com/23 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering.
(17) Account based on personal observation.
(1) Digital databases: Even at this early stage in research, the digital information in the databases is sufficient to identify elevations of individual land parcels the size of a small house lot, so the data is far more accurate than any earlier assessments. Cynthia Rosenzweig et al., Climate Change and Cities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
(2) J. L. Weiss et al., “Implications of Recent Sea Level Rise Science for Low-Elevation Areas in Coastal Cities of the Conterminous U.S.A.,” Climate Change 105 (2011): 635–45.
(3) Dan Cayan et al., Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Scenarios for California Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment (Sacramento: California Natural Resources Agency, 2012).
(4) Weiss et al., “Implications,” 635–45.
(5) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/hurricane-sandy-cuomo-bloomberg-climate-change_n_2043982.html
(6) Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young, The Rising Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 4.
(7) The definitive study is Foresight’s Migration and Global Environmental Change (London: Government Office on Science, Foresight Project on Global Environmental Migration, 2011).
(8) Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001), chap. 11, describes Chinese famines and their consequences. Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 6, summarizes what is known of ancient Egyptian famines.