Foundations of the Eart: Global Ecological Change and the Book of Job

Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?

As was pointed out in chapter 2, the “whirlwind speech” creation narrative is different from other biblical creation stories (Psalms 74:13–14, 89:10–14; Isaiah 51:9–10) and from other creation accounts in the region. In the Babylonian Enŭma Elish, a lightning-welding warrior god named Marduk splits the body of the primordial sea goddess, Tiamat, in half and thus forms the world. As in the Joban account, Marduk constrains the seas within an enforced boundary demarcating the sea and the land.¹ While the boundary aspects are similar, the Enŭma Elish account differs in others. It is violent and combative. This is the case for myths of a divine warrior conquering the sea (or sea monsters), which is seen as a primordial force and emblem for chaos in many Near Eastern texts.²

By contrast in Job, God functions in the whirlwind speech as midwife to the sea’s birth. He is the sea’s collaborator and not its opponent.³ The sea bursts from the womb and is dressed in clouds. It is swaddled in darkness to calm its thrashing. The sea is birthed, calmed, and put into its proper place in the cosmos. This stands in sharp contrast to the divine warrior dominating sea monsters in other regional mythologies.⁴ In the latter part of the whirlwind speech in Job, God sports with the fearsome forces of his creation—the Leviathan, a fire-spitting, heavily armored sea dragon, which God can play with as if it were a bird, and the Behemoth, a gigantic, amphibious beast that only God can approach. In dealing with the sea, the Leviathan, and the Behemoth, God is at ease with powerful entities that He has created and that He nurtures and enjoys.

Standing on the shore of an ocean, the waters seem to be at odds with an unseen opponent. The waves wash in and recede only to come back again and again in a regular rhythm. Watch the waves long enough, and one realizes that it is a rising tide. The sea is winning its incremental warfare to gain the land. But come back a few hours later, and the tide has turned: the sea is losing to the land. It is calming, even spiritual, to watch. One knows that the tide is driven by the positional change of the Sun and Moon with respect to Earth, but the sea seems alive and pulsating. Return to the same beach after the storm of the century or the tsunami of a millennium, and one understands the fierceness of the sea crashing against its bounds.

These same bathymetric considerations produce extreme tides in some locations. Bodies of water have frequencies of variation that relate to depth, size, and shape. Imagine holding a large bowl of half full of water. If you wiggle the bowl to and fro, there is a frequency at which the period of “slosh” of the water in the bowl matches frequency of your moving of the bowl—the “waves” will increase until the water spills over the edge and onto the floor. Similarly, when the frequencies that the tides push and pull a large basin of water (such as the roughly 12.5-hour periodicity in the tide from the gravity of the Moon or the twelve-hour component caused by the influence of the Sun) match the period of the natural “slosh” of the water body, tides are amplified. This same concept, starting in the Victorian era, was used to construct tide-prediction machines, which will be discussed later in this chapter. The record-holding location for tides has long been considered to be the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Bay of Fundy’s tides may actually be tied with those of Ungava Bay, a large bay off of the Hudson Strait and surrounded by northern Quebec. Both have high tides of around seventeen meters.5 Ungava Bay is covered with ice most of the year; the Bay of Fundy is ice free.

The connection among tides, Moon, and Sun has been known since ancient times. Pytheus of Massalia sailed to northwestern Europe and circumnavigated Great Britain in 325 BCE. Along with documenting polar ice and the midnight Sun that does not set in the far north on the summer solstice, Pytheus also reported that the Moon caused the tides. This is apparently the first written record noting this interaction.6 The Babylonian astronomer Seleucus of Seleucia in the second century BCE linked the variations of the tides with the Sun and Moon as part of his demonstration that the Earth rotated on its own axis as it orbited around the Sun.⁷ Seleucus understood the tides were attributable to the attraction of the Moon, and he also realized that a longer-term variation in the height of the tides depended on the Moon’s position relative to the Sun.⁸

While Pytheus and Seleucus may represent early writings on the tides and celestial movements, the understanding of such relationships goes back even further into history. This will be discussed in chapter 6 as a consideration of another of the whirlwind questions, “Do you understand the ordinances of the heavens” (Job 38:33). The cycles that are seen in nature are driven by cycles, such as the orbital cycles of the Moon and Sun or the spin of the Earth on its own orbit, which do not multiply and divide into one another equally. This makes reconciling a calendar based on solar days, lunar months, and solar years quite complex. One gets a glimpse of this complexity when considering the tides and their regular variations.

The relative position of the Moon and Sun are indicated by how much of the face of the Moon is illuminated. Along coasts in which there are two tides a day, the differences in the height of high and low tides are at a maximum when the moon is full and again when the moon is new. These are the two times when the Sun, Moon, and Earth lie on a straight line. Such an occurrence happens about once every two weeks and is known as syzygy,⁹ which would be a killer Scrabble word (if Scrabble had more than two Y’s). The tides at syzygy are larger, typically about 20 percent greater than normal, because the tidal effect of the Moon and Sun reinforce the other. Such maxima are called spring tides, in the sense of spring meaning “to move or jump suddenly or rapidly upwards.”¹⁰ Spring tides do not refer to the spring season. When there is a first- or last-quarter moon, the Moon’s and Sun’s tidal effect partially cancel the other, and the difference between high and low tides is at a minimum. This condition is called a neap tide. The meaning of “neap” is not certain, but it originates in Old English.¹¹

The regular orbital variation in tides also has longer-term patterns attributable to different combinations of the conditions that affect the orbits of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. The trifecta of orbital combinations, called a perigean spring tide, occurs when a lunar perigee (the closest approach of the Moon’s elliptical orbit to the Earth) occurs when Earth, Moon, and Sun are in syzygy. Under these conditions one gets much greater tidal range, with higher highs and lower lows than average. When the Moon’s orbit is furthest from the Earth (apogee) on a first- or last-quarter moon, there is an apogean neap tide with a greatly reduced tidal range.

The perigean spring tide and its antithesis, the apogean neap tide, appear both in literature and in history.12 As an early literary example, “The Franklin’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is thought to be related to a perigean spring tide that occurred in December 1340. Geoffrey Chaucer had a keen interest in astronomy, which is particularly evident in his works after about 1385.¹³ In the Franklin’s Tale, Averagus seeks knightly honor and leaves his wife, Dorigen, alone near the town of Penmarc’h in modern Brittany. Dorigen has two principal concerns, the premonition that her beloved husband’s ship will wreck on the black rocks of the Brittany coasts as he returns and the unwanted attention of a would-be suitor, Aurelius. Hoping to discharge Aurelius’s attentions, she tells him,

In military history, the tides and phases of the moon (and their interactions) have long been a part of military tactics, particularly amphibious landings. In September 13, 1759, the British general Wolfe calculated the complex tidal delays of the St. Lawrence Estuary and timed his attack on the French forces on the Plains of Abraham.¹⁵ Wolfe’s forces paused awaiting favorable tides on a dark night and altered the history of Canada and North America.

In the run-up to the American Revolution, a colonial ship’s pilot steered the British ship the HMS Cancaeux, which was en route to reinforce Fort William and Mary near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, behind a shoal on a spring high tide. The Cancaeux was trapped for days, giving Paul Revere ample opportunity to spread the “Portsmouth Alarm,”¹⁶ which warned the colonists to raid the undermanned fort for its gunpowder before the Cancaeux’s reinforcements arrived. The Boston Tea Party occurred on the low of a perigean spring tide, which explains, among other things, why the tea dumped into the Boston Harbor persisted there into the next day and why the water was so low that “three of the vessels lay aground.”¹⁷

More recently in World War II, in the early hours of October 14, 1939, the German submarine U-47 used a perigean spring high tide to slip into the British Navy’s anchorage in the Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands by an unexpected route. The U-boat torpedoed the battleship HMS Royal Oak with a loss of life of 833 men and boys—120 of those who died were “boy sailors” between fourteen and eighteen years of age. The sinking of the HMS Royal Oak was the British Navy’s largest such loss of boy sailors either before or since.18 The U.S. Marines’ amphibious assault on Tarawa in the World War II Battle of the Pacific was launched on an apogean neap tide. The landing crafts hung on the reefs, making the eventual victory more costly.¹⁹

In World War II, Hitler’s planned 1940s invasion of England (Unternehmen Seelöwe, or Operation Sea Lion) was assumed by the British to occur on high tide to minimize the width of open beach to be crossed. On Churchill’s request, the British Admiralty computed the most likely time for such an invasion as “when high water occurs near dawn, with no Moon” and computed such times for beaches near eight British ports. These calculations were developed on mechanical devices that computed the different frequencies that affected tidal change.²⁰

The first such device was a machine of dozens of gears and pulleys designed to mimic the various Sun-Moon-Earth interactions. The device inked the tide changes for a given location on a rolling sheet of paper. The first such device considered eight different periodicities of tides and was developed by Lord Kelvin in 1872.²¹ In 1882, William Ferrel developed a machine computing nineteen tidal components for the U.S. Coast Guard and Geodetic Survey.²² Edward Roberts designed a forty-component device based on Lord Kelvin’s design for the Bidston Observatory’s Liverpool Tidal Institute in 1906,²³ and a second U.S. machine with thirty-seven tidal components was designed by Rollin Harris and built in 1912.²⁴ These huge brass machines were applied to compute the tides over the course of a year for reference stations all over the world.

Having failed to wipe out the Royal Air Force, Hitler cancelled Operation Sea Lion. The British Admiralty ceased to publish tide-prediction tables from the machines so as to not aid the German war effort—probably for naught. In 1915–1916, the Germans had constructed their own tide-predicting machine, which they used in World War I. A second German machine, developed by Heinrich Rauschelbach and built between 1935 and 1939, is now on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Computing sixty-two tidal components, this was the largest such device ever built: 7.5 meters long, two meters wide, and a weight of about seven metric tons. This second German machine was used in the World War II U-boat campaigns.25

A most remarkable application of the British devices was in computing the tides for the Normandy invasion for the Allied Forces’ Operation Overlord.²⁶ An overhauled version of the original 1872 Kelvin machine and the 1906 Roberts machine were housed in the Bidston Tidal Observatory in Liverpool. The devices were maintained in two separate buildings so that one bomb would not destroy them both. Six young women under the supervision of Arthur Thompson Doodson, the world’s leading authority on tidal predictions,²⁷ worked long shifts, seven days a week, using these devices to compute the Admiralty tide tables.²⁸ In October 1943, William Farquharson, the Admiralty’s superintendent of tides, requested Doodson to compute the hourly tides for Position Z (the codename for Normandy Beach) for April through July 1944. Farquharson had only incomplete tide data from some nearby beaches along with some recent data from midget submarines and small boats on the currents and tides. It is not clear how he managed to provide Doodson with the calibration settings for the machines.²⁹

General Rommel, anticipating an Allied invasion that he felt would occur at high tide, had filled the possible French invasion beaches with underwater obstacles that would be underwater at midtide. These were spotted by reconnaissance airplanes. There were so many such obstacles that there was one “on every two or three yards of the front.”³⁰ The invasion would need to be initiated on a low tide, so engineers in the advance forces could destroy these obstacles. On Normandy Beach, with six-meter tides, the tide rises at over one meter per hour from low tide, so the engineers destroying beach barriers would have to arrive on time and work very fast. There were other constraints as well. Bruce Parker notes:

D-Day was delayed from the planned date of June 5 by bad weather. Eisenhower decided to go on June 6 based on a forecast of a thirty-six-hour clearing in the weather.³² Rommel, believing that the Allies would invade on a high tide and noting the foul weather, assumed June 6 would not be the day and was in Germany celebrating his wife’s birthday when the invasion began.³³

The explanation of tidal phenomena seems to require a very physics- and mathematics-oriented discourse. Considering Chaucer as a literary example of an unusual perigean spring tide or contemplating the historical role of tides as constraints on military tactics hopefully makes this topic more approachable. The great brass tide-prediction machines, which could grind out predictions of tides for any given location, operated by combining periodic components of tides (Earth, Moon, Sun, their orbits and combinations of these orbits) with calibrations appropriate to the coastline and the bathometry of the location, are a tangible realization of the prediction of tides by the frequency components of the driving factors. The calculations that Doodson and his assistants churned out over days to schedule the D-Day invasion can be done in seconds on a modern digital computer.

One might ask how long these cycles upon cycles of tidal components can be. On January 4, 1912, a perigean spring tide (under a full moon) occurred within a few minutes of the Earth being at its closest to the sun in its orbit. The result was a lunar distance from the Earth of 356,375 kilometers, the closest in 1,400 years.34 But there are even longer cycles in the orbital interactions that affect the climate.

If one considers the bounds of the sea (or the more mundane term, “mean sea level”) over longer time periods, such as the Pleistocene epoch, the bounds of the sea seem much less proscribed by the “bars and doors” of Job 38:10. If one takes the long view over one hundred million years and considers the earlier stands of the seas, the relative height of the seas was 170 meters (between eighty-five and 270 meters) higher than those today.³⁵ These long-term variations in the height of the seas are strongly a product of the size of the sea basins, which can change in their dimensions under several geological actions.³⁶

In geologically more recent times, say over the past 2.5 million years, the sea level has varied thanks to the formation and melting of the continental glaciers of the glacial Ice Ages. Twenty thousand years ago, the oceans stood about 130 meters lower than they do today. Reduce the ocean’s height by 130 meters, and the U.S. Atlantic coast lies two to three hundred kilometers seaward from the current coastline. England connects to Europe and Ireland. The Thames and the Rhine flow together into the Dover Strait of the English Channel. Australia and New Guinea merge, as do the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Japan joins the Asian mainland; so do Java, Sumatra, Bali, and Borneo.

For the past 2.7 million years of the Pleistocene epoch, a remarkable amount of water (roughly fifty million cubic kilometers) has moved back and forth between the oceans to glaciers on the land as the climate has cooled and warmed.37 This is unusual over the long run of geological time, which certainly has witnessed other ice ages of considerable duration. Alternating glaciations represent a minority of the total geological history. Freezing large volumes of ice on the land in vast continental glaciers evokes the Joban question, “From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen” (Job 38:29–30). One of the significant effects of ice stages during ice ages has been dramatic change in the sea level over the past 2.7 million years.

Geologically, we are in a time of the Earth when glaciers have regularly expanded and contracted. Cyclical changes in glaciation/deglaciation during the Pleistocene epoch seem driven by variations in the orbit of the Earth and the angle of its axis. These cyclical changes are called the Milankovitch cycles after the Serbian mathematician, Milutin Milanković, who worked on the theory during his internment as a prisoner of war in World War I. Milankovitch cycles cause systematic variations in the incoming solar radiation from the Sun. For example, there is less incoming radiation when the Earth is furthest from the Sun in its orbit and more when it is closer. There are periodicities of around 400,000, 100,000, 40,000, and 26,000 years, which can be determined from interpreting long sediment cores extracted from the ocean floor. There are also variations in solar activity that can affect global heating and cooling.³⁸

The wobble in the Earth’s axis, one of the Milankovitch cycles, will be discussed in chapter 6 as a necessary correction in analyzing ancient monuments and megaliths for their possible use in predicting astronomical events. The 26,000-thousand-year wobble of the axis of the planet affects whether the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere are pointed toward the Sun when the Earth-to-Sun distance is smallest. At the other extreme of this cycle, the water-dominated Southern Hemisphere faces the sun at the minimum distance (or some position between these two extremes). Other Milankovitch components involve the cycle of the shape of the Earth’s orbit between a circular or elliptical orbit, the cycle of change in the inclination of the Earth’s orbit, the cyclical change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis, and cycles of change in the location in the Earth’s orbit where the spring and fall equinoxes occur.

These cycles interacting with other cycles reminds one of the periodic components of the tides. Indeed, calculations of the Milankovitch variations of solar variation at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere could have been performed on the big brass machines that Doodson and his assistants used to calculate the tides for the Normandy invasion. Predicting the consequences of these changes on incoming solar radiation to the Earth’s ocean, land, ice, and atmosphere to understand the climate dynamics is much more complex. The modeling of these simultaneous interactions strains the capability of the most advanced modern computers.

It appears that the amount of summer solar radiation on the Northern Hemisphere’s polar regions, where ice sheets and continental glaciers have formed in the past (around 65°N), correlate well with formation of continental glaciers. Incoming solar radiation at high latitudes in the south could also have similar consequences, but with different timing.39 There is certainly a tremendous amount of ice stored in Antarctica today.

What made the current ice age, during which we originated as a species, and the interglacial, in which we now live? It seems the Milankovitch variations in solar input are important in understanding the waxing and waning of the Pleistocene’s crop of glaciers, but these cycles have presumably been in operation over all the Earth’s history. To form vast ice sheets on the land requires relatively warm winters and the transport of moisture to the high latitudes. The summers need to be relatively cooler so that the ice accumulates and does not melt. What triggered the transition to the icy Pleistocene?

One clue is provided by the ratios of isotopes of oxygen in fossils in the ocean sediments. Foraminifera, or “forams,” are a group of protozoa found in the oceans and in brackish water that are armored with shells made of calcium carbonate. Dead planktonic forams rain down to the ocean floor. There their shells are preserved as fossils in the ocean sediment. Remarkably, these fossil shells on the bottom of the ocean can tell us about the amount of ice on the surface of the Earth when the forams were alive. How? Water contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The oxygen atom usually has eight protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus (denoted ¹⁶O); a small proportion of the oxygen forming water molecules has two extra neutrons (denoted ¹⁸O). Water made of ¹⁸O is called heavy water. When water evaporates, the heavy ¹⁸O isotope of oxygen tends to be left behind. When there is lots of ice (from snow from water evaporated from the ocean) piled up on the land, there is proportionally more ¹⁸O that has been left behind in the oceans.40 Thus, the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the carbonate “skeletons” of fossil forams in the sediment records the amount of ice on Earth.

Two deep-ocean sediment cores representing about five million years of deposition of material in the deep ocean show the isotope signatures of significant ice deposition starting about 2.7 million years ago. One of these cores is from the Caribbean Sea;⁴¹ the other is from the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.⁴² The variations in the abundance of ¹⁸O in these and other similar records match the patterns of variation predicted by the Milankovitch theory.⁴³ At about the same time, melting icebergs calved from glaciers and afloat in the North Atlantic began to sprinkle rocks onto the deep ocean sediments below.⁴⁴

Sometime around three million years ago,⁴⁵ the Isthmus of Panama closed and potentially directed the flow of warm Atlantic water northward to supply the moisture for heavy ice-sheet-forming snows.⁴⁶ Other theories identify potential conditions for an ice age around three million years ago, including reduced concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, producing a “reverse greenhouse effect” of planetary cooling, or complex positive feedback loops in the planet’s land, ocean, and atmospheric systems producing a threshold response toward cooling.⁴⁷ Changes in the structure of North Pacific waters could increase input of water vapor to augment fall and winter snowfall.⁴⁸

Over the Pleistocene, the Earth has been in an icy, glaciated condition (a “glacial”) much longer that it has been in a less icy “interglacial” condition. It is clear that there is a strong interaction between the height of the ocean and climate,49 but there is also a need for more information to understand how this all works. Interglacials, such as the current condition of the Earth, have been in place for only about 10 percent of the time over the past two million years.⁵⁰

We have more sources of information about changes over the past interglacial/glacial/interglacial cycle, for example, actual samples of prehistoric air, which have been trapped as bubbles in the glacial ice of Greenland and Antarctica for hundreds of thousands of years.⁵¹ There is also more information on the relative height of the sea and land for this more recent timeframe. One difficulty in understanding changes in sea level is that if the land is rising, the sea appears to be falling and vice versa. When millions of tons of ice accrete across subcontinental-scale areas, the crust is pushed downward by the weight. When the ice melts, this crustal compression is released, and the land rises. This “glacial rebound” can be used to interpret the amount of mass that might have been in the former glaciers,⁵² but it is also a complication to understanding sea level rise.

Understanding changes in sea level of tens and hundreds of meters, which derive from kilometer-thick continental glaciers storing water as ice over tens of thousands of years, is a different problem from understanding changes in sea levels in the range of meters or less over the next century. However, the large-scale, long-term changes inform the more immediate problem: “What will be the height of the seas in the year 2100?”

The Laurentide ice sheet is now gone. A time in the past that is more analogous to the present-day distribution of ice occurred at the end of the last interglacial, about 120,000 years ago. At this time, global mean sea level is estimated to have been four to six meters higher than today.⁵⁵ This was the response to a few millennia of elevated temperatures that appear to have significantly melted the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.⁵⁶ The seas rose 1.6 meters per century from a 2°C average global temperature increase.⁵⁷ This is significant since a 2°C average global warming lies well within the range predicted by the current assessments of human-generated “greenhouse gas” global change.⁵⁸ It also agrees with some “high” predictions that have been made for a 1.0±0.5-meter sea level increase by the year 2100.⁵⁹ It is a cautionary finding, to say the least.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a report in 2007 discussing the current state of our scientific understanding of the possible change in the Earth’s climate from human alterations of the air, land, and oceans.60 The report evaluates the expected sea level rise resulting from a global change in the climate. This is a complex endeavor involving such intricacies as prediction of the use of fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gases. To understand future atmospheric emissions requires prediction of the future economy, future population, and future technological innovation. This combination of factors, all of which influence emissions to the atmosphere, sometimes are called the Kaya identity.⁶¹ Different scenarios of patterns of global economic development and governance constrain these intrinsically difficult projections. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report attempts to wrestle with these uncertainties and other potential uncertainties using a multidisciplinary synthesis. Given the complexity of its task, it is a quite readable document and is available on the Internet.⁶²

The report notes that the measured sea level rise between 1961 and 2003 amounted to 1.8 millimeters per year. This rate is 10 percent of the much higher rates seen at the end of the last interglacial.⁶³ In the last decade of this measurement interval (1993–2003), the rate of rise accelerated to about 3.1 millimeters per year. Sea level rise was predicted to increase to between 0.26 and 0.59 meters by the year 2100,⁶⁴ for the “warmest” of the climate change scenarios considered,⁶⁵ which, averaged across a collection of different global climate models, produces a range of 2.4°C to 6.4°C global warming by the year 2100. This increase is on the low side of the rate of sea level rise computed for the last interglacial, which saw a similar degree of warming. The projections of sea level rise have been exceeded by observed increases over the relatively short time interval since the report.⁶⁶

Sea level increase also stems from the expansion of water in warming oceans. This is the source for about half the sea level rise seen from 1993 to 2003. The melting of glaciers and the ice caps of mountains account for about a quarter of the increase.⁶⁷ The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets each contribute about one-eighth of the observed sea level rise. By the decade of 2090 to 2099, the projected rate of sea level rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change averages to 3.8 mm per year. This prediction derives from several different scenarios of climate change along with applications of different computer models of oceans.⁶⁸

However, since the IPCC report, other evaluations have pushed the expected sea level increase upward to a meter or more.69 Around 70 percent or slightly more of the increase in sea level over the century is expected to come from the expansion of the warming ocean waters. By end of the century, mountain glaciers and mountain ice caps will largely be gone, and their contribution to sea level rise will become relatively small.⁷⁰ Greenland and western Antarctica will increase in their contribution to sea level rise, but the amount is uncertain. Indeed, the uncertainty of sea level increases in the coming century is relatively high, in no small part because the sea level integrates a cascade of uncertainties from other changes: change in global temperature, in the amount of ocean warming, and in the dynamics of change in the Greenland and western Antarctic ice sheets.

The millions of people who live adjacent to coasts are the immediate concern when considering the effects of a 0.5-to-1.5-meter increase in sea level.⁷¹ Worldwide, about 10 percent of the world’s population, disproportionally from the least developed countries, lives on coastal lowlands (areas ten meters or less above sea level).⁷² In the United States, 2.7 million people live below the one-meter-above-high-tide mark.⁷³ The hazard lies with the change of the combination of tides and high water from storms. In one study, sea level increase by the middle of this century could significantly change the occurrence of storm surges.⁷⁴ In some exceptional locations, events now expected to occur once every one hundred years will become annual events. In one-third of the sites studied, a once-in-a-century event could be expected to occur once a decade. The authors summarize the patterns:

Pacific coast locations are most in danger of seeing their historical extremes frequently surpassed in the coming few decades, followed by the Atlantic. Gulf locations appear in least danger of a rapid shift, despite rapid relative sea level rise, due to the high amplitudes of historical storm extremes, which render the relative effect of sea level rise small.⁷⁵

These are some locations that are extremely vulnerable to sea level increase on the order of one meter or less.76 There are several coastal cities that are sinking from land subsidence and from the sheer weight of the human construction there. Venice and New Orleans are examples of such cities. Of course, the flooding of these cities (for example, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina) is exacerbated by sea level rise. Half of Europe’s coastal wetlands are expected to disappear as a result of sea level rise.⁷⁷ The annual cost of protecting Singapore’s coast is expected to be between US$0.3 and $5.7 million by 2050 and to triple that by 2100.⁷⁸ Studies in Thailand indicate that a loss of land in response to a sea level rise of one meter could decrease gross domestic production by 0.69 percent (approximately US$600 million per year).⁷⁹ Alexandria, Rosetta, and Port Said in the Nile Delta could see two million people displaced given a sea level rise of 0.5 meters. This could cost 214,000 jobs and produce a land loss valued at US$35 billion.⁸⁰ While the potential effects are widespread, poorer nations and their citizens are particularly vulnerable to many of the consequences of sea level increases.⁸¹ The biological and implications of sea level change are also nontrivial. In the modern world, human action is playing a role in the alteration of the oceans and their boundaries.⁸²

Looke what day that endelong Britayne	On whatever day that from end to end of Brittany
Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon,	You remove all the rocks, stone by stone,
That they ne lette ship ne boot to goon—	So that they do not prevent ship nor boat to go—
I seye, whan ye han maad the coost so clene	I say, when you have made the coast so clean
Of rokkes that ther nys no stoon ysene,	Of rocks that there is no stone seen,
Thanne wol I love yow best of any man;	Then will I love you best of any man;
Have heer my trouthe, in al that evere I kan.	Have here my pledged word, in all that is in my power.¹⁴