Like no other movie Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster made extensive use of the iconology of cities, and most of all of the most iconic of them all: New York!
In a very clever way, the advertisment company also adopted this strategy to various localities, asking the local audiences, “Where will you be?” Here is the ad for the Australian release:
English-American painter Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) created a series of five images depicting the rise and the destruction of an imaginary coastal city. The series is entitled “The Course of Empire”. Above, the fourth painting depicts the catastrophe and destruction of the city. Cole imagined here a junction of various man made and natural disasters: Insurgence, war, fires, storms and a flood.
In the final, fifth image the scene is set several decades after the destruction. Here nature has reclaimed the urban landscape and there is a peaceful, maybe even idyllic calm to the scene. From today’s point of view, this seems like an environmentalist comment on our current debates.
Athens based artist collective Latent Community produced this wonderful film about the story of Kallio in Fokida, Greece, a village that was expropriated in 1969 and was covered in 1981 by the waters of the artificial lake created by the Mornos Dam for use as a reservoir for the city of Athens. The lake has been the main source of water for the Greek capital ever since. The community got dispersed, many of the people of Kallio now living in Athens themselves.
I was lucky to meet Latent Community in their studio in Athens and discuss the impact of flooding on the collective psyche of a community and the political implications of Athens incessant thirst for fresh water.
Atafona is a Brazilian town of 6,000 people, 200 miles up the coast from the famed beaches of Rio’s Copacabana and Ipanema.
“The sea devoured [Atafona’s] historic lighthouse, bars, nightclubs, markets, a four-story hotel, a gas station for boats, a school, sumptuous summer mansions, two churches, and an island where 300 hundred fisher families lived. The Ilha da Convivência (Island of Coexistence), as it was known, was 650 feet from shore. Nenéu was born there in 1974, when islanders, fearing an ocean already on the rise, began moving from Convivência to the continent. Today, the only thing left is a narrow land strip with sad ruins. In all, researchers estimate that the erosion has created over 2,000 environmental refugees here since about 1960.”
“There is in Atafona, especially among the old residents, a mixture of mysticism, religion, and science. For them, the ocean is a living being, and the coastal erosion a punishment for errors committed by man, such as having built the old church on the shore with its back facing the ocean,” says civil engineer Gilberto Pessanha Ribeiro, coordinator of the Coastal Dynamics Observatory at the Federal University of São Paulo, which has been researching Atafona for 18 years.”
“The fisherman Nenéu spent $3,000 on the rocks that he hopes will save his house, though he knows that the solution is ephemeral. “The sea isn’t wrong; it wants what belongs to him back,” says Nenéu. “It will swallow everything, but I’ll resist.”
source: National Geographic
This is a list of the beaches with the largest annual land erosion. Four of the top seven spots are in the USA alone, another one in Peru and two in Northern Europe.
My favorite idea from the DC Aquaman movie (2018) is merely a small detail. When the Aquarians start to fight back against us, the people above sea level, one of their first maneuvers is throwing the human garbage back on land. That includes of course submarines. Here are two images from the news-flash-section of the movie:
The Alexander Romance is an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great. Although constructed around a historical core, the romance is largely fictional. It was widely copied and translated, accruing various legends and fantastical elements at different stages. The original version was composed in Ancient Greek some time before 338 CE, when a Latin translation was made, although the exact date is unknown. (from Wikipedia)
One of those tales is about a deep sea dive Alexander undertook:
” In the Problemata, a text contentiously credited to Aristotle, the philosopher tells how his student Alexander the Great descends to the depths of the sea in “a very fine barrel made entirely of white glass”, as a later poet would put it. The reasons for this descent differ across time. For some, it was to scout submarine defenses surrounding the city of Tyre during its siege. Others depict the Macedonian king met with a cruel vision of the great chain of being, stating, upon resurfacing, that “the world is damned and lost. The large and powerful fish devour the small fry”.
In one particularly elaborate version, Alexander submerges with companions — a dog, cat, and cock — entrusting his life to a mistress who holds the cord used to retrieve the bathysphere. However, during his dive, she is seduced by a lover and persuaded to elope, dropping the chains that anchor Alexander and his animal companions to their boat. Through a gruesome utility, the pets help him survive: the cock keeps track of time in the lightless fathoms, the cat serves as a rebreather to purify the vessel’s atmosphere, and the poor hound’s body becomes a kind of airbag, propelling Alexander back to the sea’s surface.” (from Public Domain Review)
When the story was told to me by Tobias Bulang, he explained that to medieval believe, the ocean does not keep dead bodies inside. Thus Alexander’s diving bell would rise back to the surface because the ocean emited the animal’s corpse. The fact that drowned corpses tend to float on the surface of the water instead of sinking to the ground gives plausible cause for this believe. Still I would be interested to understand, what people then believed to be the cause for this.
The image of Alexandre the Great below the sea became quite popular in the visual arts of the 14. and the following centuries. You can see many more creative and vivid illustrations here.
Thanks to Tobias Bulang for the lead.
In the 46 sqkm city of Pekalongan, there are dozens of neighbourhoods under threat of becoming one with the sea, with saltwater encroaching inland for up to 1.5km. At the heart of the problem is Pekalongan’s overreliance on groundwater, which is not only extracted for domestic use but also to irrigate fish farms and rice fields.
The over-extraction of groundwater has caused the city to sink at a rate of between 10cm to 15cm per year. In some areas, the land subsidence has been as severe as 26cm per year.
Meanwhile, climate change has brought more extreme rainfall, stronger winds, higher waves and rising sea levels. Scientists have warned that if nothing is done to stop the widespread land subsidence and encroachment of the sea, the entire city could be underwater by 2036.
Thanks to IVAA for the lead!
Tōrō nagashi ( 灯籠流し or 灯篭流し) is a Japanese ritual usually performed as part of the Festival of the Dead – O-bon (お盆) or Bon – in summer but also in connection to various other important events. In the ceremony people set lit paper lanterns afloat on a river or on the ocean, simbolizing the souls of the deceased returning to the afterlife. According to traditional Japanese believe, all life comes from the water. The ritual is however not unique to Japan, it is also performed in various forms in China, Korea and Hawaii.
In Richard L. Parry’s book “Ghosts of the Tsunami” one of the interviewees makes a connection between the ritual and the destruction of the town Naburi during the tsunami in 2011:
“An old fisherman named Yuichiro Kamiyama had moored his boat and gone about the houses, chivvying the villagers up the steep hill. From there, they watched the water withdrawing from the harbour, and returning unstoppably to overwhelm first the sea wall, then the road and then the alleys dividing the wooden houses, until it lifted them up and spun them around on its frothing surface. The water rose and rose through the pines on the hillside towards the spot where the dumbfounded villagers were watching. A few feet below where they crouched, it slowed and withdrew.
The sight reminded Kamiyama of the summer Festival of the Dead, when illuminated paper lanterns are set adrift on the tide to guide the spirits back across to the far world. ‘The houses receded all together, along with the sea,’ he said. “They were all in a row, like the festival lanterns, floating out over the sea wall. And the electricity poles too, with the wires between them. Those wires are strong — they didn’t break. They were all taken back intact into the sea. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but it was beautiful.’”
from: Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami. (2017), pp 109
see also this post.