Tag: 21. Century

The Loen Rock Slides in Norway in 1905 and 1936

Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages.

Lake Lovatnet is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Norway. In the first decade of the 1900s and again in the 1930s large fissures in the rock formation above the lake appeared and eventually rocks repeatedly fell into the lake. In 1905 a massive piece of the mountainside loosened and fell into the lake, producing waves of up to 40 meters in height that completely destroyed the two farm villages on the shore. “61 people lost their lives, half the population of Bødal and Nesdal together. Only ten were ever found.”

The villages were rebuilt, only a little bit higher up the shore. In 1936 daily rock falls happened again before eventually in September that year “one million cubic meters of rock fell down from 800 m height into Lake Lovatnet, pushing up the water and creating three waves; the highest a more than 74 meters high.” The two towns were once again completely destroyed.

Only a hundred kilometers away in a fjord called Tafjord the same thing happened in 1934: a massive piece of rock fell off the mountianside and sent a tsunami wave 17 meters high, reaching up to 300 meters inwards land, crushing houses and other buildings, moving large boats inwards land and killing 23 people.

This threat of rock slides resulting in tsunamis and floodings is common to this region of Norway. In 2015 director Roar Uthaug made a film based on the assumption that a similar event is expected to occur anytime in the future on the Åkerneset mountain, not far from Tarfjord. The movie entitled “The Wave” was so successful, two consecutive films were produced in 2018 and 2022.

The village of Bodal after the Loen Rock Slide. Click on the image for online source.
Image from the movie “The Wave”.
The fjord today. Click on the image for online source.
Image from the movie “The Wave”.

There is an excellent article about the Loen disasters by Christer Hoel online here. The quotes in my post are all from his text. I used another image from the movie here.

Sunken City Deep Dive Dubai

“Take the plunge and explore an abandoned and flooded city, an incredible 60 meters underwater. Experience Deep Dive Dubai – a world of exciting and unique scuba and freediving opportunities,” reads the website of Deep Dive Dubai, a newly opened diving resort. The resort is said to be conveniently located “– 15 minutes from Downtown Dubai and 25 minutes from Dubai International Airport –” and sets the world record for the deepest artificial diving pool, featuring artificial ruins for the divers to explore.

Of course, Deep Dive Dubai, cashes in on the uncanny of a dive among ruins in a city that according to studies from 2010 could very likely be submerged by 2100. Dubai ranks high among the coastal cities most at risk from sea level rise.
The “sunken city” appears to be such a vital marketing element, it even has it’s own icon on all webpages of the company, as you can see below:

Artificial ruins are not a new idea. They were already once the rage among landscape architects in the period of romanticism in the 19. century all over Europe. For more info on the cult of ruins, you can read online the publication by Anne Eriksen enticingly titled “The Murmur of Ruins” or check out the wikipedia entry on ruins with images of the garden of the castle Schönbrunn in Vienna.

‘Extremes will become normal’

Quote by Lam Chiu-ying, former director of the Hong Kong Observatory, the central weather forecast agency of the government of Hong Kong, from an article in the Hong Kong Free Press about the Black Rainstorm and massive deluge of the week of September 4. 2023.

Here is a selection of photo images and video stills from international media coverage from September 9. 2023.

https://hongkongfp.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Kyle_HKFP_20230908-17-Copy.jpg
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hong-kongs-heaviest-rain-least-140-years-floods-city-streets-metro-2023-09-08/
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hong-kongs-heaviest-rain-least-140-years-floods-city-streets-metro-2023-09-08/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-66748239
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hong-kongs-heaviest-rain-least-140-years-floods-city-streets-metro-2023-09-08/

Are floating cities a remedy for over-crowded coastal cities, land subsidence and rising sea level?


As this documentary from German TV from 2022 clearly shows, designing floating cities is one thing, wanting to live there is quite another. I guess instinctively we all prefer “stability over floating flexibility”, as director Kristin Siebert says, land over sea, grounded houses over floating houses. As desirable living by the sea might be, living on it, is a different matter.


The film does a fine job connecting and juxtaposing places and communities from the global south and global north, sharing similar fate and trying out similar solutions.


If floating cities are a real future option for communities challenged by climate change like Malé, the capital of the Maledives, we need to look at the socio-cultural and emotional aspects of what makes people feel at home. And that might be essentially the same in the Pacific as in Germany or Holland. Breaking with a culture of habitation of several thousand years is no easy task!

(thanks to Janina Kriszeo for the lead!)

Click on image for video link!

Malé

This is an areal view of the Capital of the Maledives. The City has outgrown the island space it is built on. A new artificial island is currently under construction and land is constantly added at the shores of the city-island.

The amphibious communities of Bangkok

Three texts, three authors, three different contexts – all describing the amphibious but perilous life style of the inhabitants of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand:

In her essay from 2018 on contemporary flood protection in several metropolises across Asia, researcher Lizzie Yarina writes:

In decades past (and still today in some rural parts of the country) Thai people lived in “amphibious communities”; for example, in “raft houses” which float upwards on stilts during floods, or in villages built on two levels where upper walkways and living quarters can be used during the rainy season. But those adaptive patterns are disappearing, even as climate risk grows.

In a more visual, literary tone is the following passage. In the 2023 novel “Bangkok wakes to rain” by Thai author Pitchaya Sudbanthad, a British missionary in 19. Century Bangkok writes in a letter home:

The Siamese as a race thrive in the aquatic realm. They live as if they have been born sea nymphs that only recently joined the race of man. He goes on to describe the capital Bangkok: An hour beyond lies the capital, its riverside lined with rickety stilt houses that look incapable of withstanding even the most delicate wake of a modern steamer yet somehow maintain a mysterious integrity. Their occupants drink, , swim, wash away their filth, and fill pots to make soupy meals of their catches, everyone joined in the confluence of fluids.

And in the debut novel by US-American sci-fi author Paolo Bacigalupi “The Windup Girl” from 2009, the scene is set in a future Bangkok:

Just beyond, the dike and lock system of the King Rama XII’s seawall looms, holding back the weight of the blue ocean.
It’s difficult not to always be aware of those high walls and the pressure of the water beyond. Difficult to think of the City of Divine Beings as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. But the Thais are stubborn and have fought to keep their revered city of Krung Thep from drowning. With coal-burning pumps and leveed labor and a deep faith in the visionary leadership of their Chakri Dynasty, they have so far kept at bay that thing which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans.

For further reading on Thailand and living with water see the interview with architect Sumet Jumsai.

Ho Chi Minh City

This impressive photo of the Vietnamese metropolis in the Mekong Delta was taken by Lizzie Yarina, a researcher from the MIT Urban Crisis Lab and it accompanies her insightful article “You’re sea wall won’t save you”.

Fear of Drowning – Aquaman and the Fate of Atlantis

Last year author Ram V and artist Christian Ward published a new three piece comic book on the DC-superhero Aquaman. (I have commented on the Aquaman movie from the same year here and here.) The story is not really about Atlantis, acording to the DC universe the sunken kingdom of Aquaman’s mother. But in it Aquaman tells the story of the kingdom, as he says it was told to him by his father once. What makes this, one of countless variations of the myth, interesting to us today, is the role that the (suppressed) fear of submergence plays in it.

According to the tale, Atlantis was a swimmin city and the Atlantan people were blessed with a magic that helped them create their city and become powerful. This secret power could be accessed by magicians and kings but the power also accessed and read the minds of these rulers and eventually threatened to manifest their suppressed fears as well as their desires. “And which was the one fear that haunted every man, every woman and every child in Atlantis every day,” the text reads. “What if Atlantis were to drown?” (my translations from the German print version)

And of course this is what happens: Atlantis sinks beneath the sea level. It’s rulers manage to create an underwater habitat and thereby safe the population while also sending the magic power source, called “Dark World”, away into outer-space. The text concludes: “The mystery in Atlantis’ heart was both its creative force and its downfall.”

While the fall of Atlantis is usually used as a moral metaphor for blind greed and hubris, the Atlantan society created by comic author Ram V seems controlled and maybe obsessed by their ever present fear of the ocean. This is the portrait of a fragile society, one that despite all the powers and wonders it achieved lives a most perilous life, only waiting for the imminent disaster.

Life in Atlantis is essentially what Geologist Peter Haff termed live in the “technosphere” – an existence that is wholly dependent on technological solutions and utterly lost should these ever fail.

Dipesh Chakrabaty, who quotes Peter Haff in his book “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age” compares Haff’s “technosphere” to a much older text from 1955 by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt there distinguishes between a “terran” and a “maritime” existence, the latter being life onboard of a ship. Chakrabaty concludes: “If Haff’s argument is correct, that the technosphere has become a basic condition for the survival of seven (soon to be nine) billion people today, one could say that we have already made Earth into something like Schmitt’s ship.” (my translations)

Or Ram V’s Atlantis, I would add.

Chakrabaty’s conclusion is even more true for coastal communities. The existence of many of these communities rely on sea walls, dikes, pumps and other technical and architectural structures. It is intriguing to take Ram V’s tale of suppressed fears that become manifest and adapt it to the sensibilities and culture of coastal communities today. One is tempted to ask: How much Atlantis is in cities like New York, Bangkok or Jakarta?

The gradual flood

The movie “Moonfall” from 2022 might be the worst movie ever done by Roland Emmerich, the movie director a Canadian journal aptly described as a “disaster-porn artist”. Emmerich has filmed – or rather digitally created – a whole collection of gigantic flood waves over the years from “The Day After Tomorrow” in 2004 to “2012” which was released in 2009. (see my notes here)

“Moonfall” also features a flood scene albeit a visually and atmospherically quite different one. Instead of the usual bird’s eye view shot of one gigantic, towering wave crashing against the city skyline, Emmerich here chooses to depict flooding as a slower, more gradual event. The flood event is taking place at nighttime and the scene has a very dark and shadowy quality. It’s an interesting aesthetic choice that doesn’t fail to create an intense and uncanny effect.

Like in most disaster movies, the perspective is from an elevated and securely removed position. Yet the director here tries to use a less spectacular and slightly more realistic approach to the pheonomenon.

There is however another scene later in the movie that returns to the old formula of the spectacularly crashing giant water wall.

A very big shark and an underwater habitat for the rich

The action movie Meg was released in 2018 and did surprisingly well at the box offices, considering that the shark-vs-man plot seems so outdated and overdone. Apparently it was two decades in the making and it feels a bit like it too watching it. Nevertheless, there is a sequel already in cinemas now testifying to it’s apparent appeal.

The first half of the film is essentially an underwater movie and thus I found it worth analyzing for this blog. The most striking aspect of this underwater scenario seemed to me the interior design of the habitat. As opposed to the usual submarine research base, this submarine station looks a lot more like the rescue bunkers currently advertised for billionaires across the globe or the luxury ocean resorts by South-African hotel mogul Sol Kerzner. Compare this image from the movie and the one from an ad for “Atlantis Hotel” in Sanya Bay, China, below:

This is clearly not coincidental: The second half of the movie plot is prominently set in this very Sanya Bay, currently a prime Chinese tourist destination. The movie is a US-American-Chinese co-production and there are clearly visible marketing intentions at play here. (I have written about the Atlantis hotel group elsewhere in this blog.)

There is also a scene in the movie indicating quite directly the connection between the taste of the mega-rich and this kind of submarine design: Towards the beginning of the movie the US-American Billionaire who finances the research station comes to visit. Entering a freight elevator to go down to the station, he expresses his disdain with the raggedy look of the elevator’s inside, calling it inappropriate for such an expensive research project. He is than relieved to find that the station itself looks much more to his taste.

Here are two more images, with the first one being clearly reminiscent of hotel resorts (with a little girl frolicking along) and the second of the type of sleek office design favored by global market players:

The interior design tells us that this project is actually catering to the taste and needs of the wealthy class more than to science. The topic of submarine refuge is never touched upon verbally in the movie but the images speak quite loudly too, I think. One can’t help notice the stark difference to earlier movies about (and the reality of) submarine research and thus the attractiveness of these fictional rooms.

As billionaires in the real world continue to publicly participate in person in all kinds of enterprises that were once reserved for scientists only, the work environments change accordingly. This of course makes the whole enterprise highly questionable in scientific terms. And I am afraid we are going to see more of this in the future – in film and real life. (See also my post on rich men’s rescue schemes here.)