Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters

What can we learn about coping with rising sea levels from ancient times?

Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters provides ideas about how we can live with the damage from climate change that now seems inevitable. But it also is informed by the fact that humans have been coping with rising sea levels for at least 20,000 years. The Great Expansion of anatomically modern humans out of Africa began during a period when an enormous amount of water was locked up in ice caps and glaciers: sea levels were as much as 120 meters lower than they are now.

When those glaciers began to melt, the lives of nearly everyone was affected. We had to learn how to deal with sea level rise, either by moving, by building defenses, or by magic. The many stories in widely different cultures about floods and rising tides bear witness to just how traumatic these experiences were. But what happened in the past may help us in the future, and, if nothing else, give us hope that we will survive.