Bhola Cyclone of 1970

The 1970 Bhola cyclone (also known as the Great Cyclone of 1970) was a devastating tropical cyclone that struck East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) and India’s West Bengal on November 12, 1970. It remains the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded and one of the world’s deadliest humanitarian disasters. At least 300,000 people died in the storm, […]

The Bride and the Sink Hole

The city of Alexandria once had an extensive network of water cisterns below ground that distributed drinking water from a channel connecting the river Nile south-east of the city with the city’s harbor in the west. This was vital for the survival of the population as the Nile flood brought sweet water to the city […]

Heracles, the first hydraulic engineer

According to historian Terje Tvedt the Greek god and hero Heracles derived from a much older Egyptian hero of similar name. The now submerged city Heracleion off the coast of the Nile delta was named after the god and Heracles plays a central role in the ancient literature of the region. The historian Diodorus of […]

Storm surge events on the North Sea

12/26/838First documented storm surge in the North Sea; Approximately 2,500 deaths in what is now the Netherlands. 2/17/1164First Julian flood: 20,000 dead; First collapse of the Jade Bay, major damage in the Elbe area. 1/16/1219First Marcellus flood: 36,000 dead: major floods also in the Elbe area; first conveyed eyewitness report. 12/28/1248Allerkindslein flood: High loss of […]

A living thing – the Barrier Islands of North Carolina

The only constant is the creed of the Barrier Islands of North Carolina according to marine scientist Orin Pilkey. In his introduction to this PBS documentary from the 1980s, Pilkey provocatively comments the image of beach houses slowly being swallowed by the sea with the following words: “For some this is a tragic and an […]

Alexandria

This famous poem is by the poet Constantinos Petrou Cafavy who was born and died in the ancient port city Alexandria. He lived from 1863 to 1933 and was a member of the large Greek community in Alexandria. His poems were also written in Greek. The City You said: “I’ll go to another country, go […]

Political flood images

In Germany, the imagery of flood or flooding and of Noah’s Ark is frequently used in the political discourse to refer to undesired migration. Since the 1990s this dehumanizing topos was in high demand and was used by mainstream media and radical political parties alike. The following are covers of Germany’s biggest news magazine from […]

Tides (2021)

“Tides” (alternative title “The Colony”) is a sci-fi movie from 2021 about a post-apocalyptic world at the moment the first human communities are about to re-settle again. The only territory suitable is a coastal strip that is covered by tides twice a day. The area is a tidal zone, not quite land and not quite […]

Raising a City

There are only a limited number of options to deal with SLR and land subsidence. One of the more obvious ones is raising buildings. There is of course limitations as to how many buildings you can possibly raise to save the habitats from inundation. Raising a whole city? Not likely. Yet in the middle of […]

The “Lost River”

Ryan Goslings 2014 movie “Lost River” is most of all a portrait of urban decay and our fascination with decay in a broader sense. The film juxtaposes the stylized display of bodily mutilation and destruction in a Grand Guignol style cabaret on the one side and the at once slow and dramatic decay of urban […]