Sunken Lands E-Book

Gareth E. Rees

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 368

Beschreibung

'A fascinating if stark warning about human hubris in ignoring our place in nature'New Scientist Travel through drowned forests, vanished villages and sinking cities: the lost lands of our past, present – and future. 'A rich, haunting account of lost lands and vanished futures.' Professor David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils From Stone Age lands that slipped beneath the English Channel to the rapid inundation of New Orleans, Gareth E. Rees explores stories of flooded places from the past – and those disappearing before our eyes. The places lost to the eternally shifting boundaries between water and land continue to have a powerful emotional resonance today. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. And, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the ebb and flow of Earth's natural cycles, and the folly of trying to control them. Sunken Lands peels back the layers of silt, sea and mythology to reveal what our submerged past can tell us about our imminent future as rising sea levels transform our planet once more. Praise for Sunken Lands 'An evocative and essential guide to disappeared places and difficult futures.' Will Wiles, author of Plume 'A beguiling exploration of lost worlds beneath the sea' Merlin Coverley, author of The Art of Wandering 'A reassuring perspective on the Anthropocene: the ebb and flow of civilisations, the inevitability of change and our capacity for renewal. Thoughtful and necessary writing.' Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time

Leseprobe

To Kirsty

The world is ready to drown. The world is ready to rise. On its surface walk creatures who have forgotten their dreams, and only rarely do they remember that their hours are brief and their days are brittle, and there will not be many chances at happiness.

Emmi Itäranta, The City of Woven Streets

CONTENTS

1 Children of the Flood

2 The Forest Beneath the Sea

3 Lost Kingdoms

4 The Shrunken Fen

5 Atlantean Dreams

6 The Sinking Isles

7 Inside the Volcano

8 Hurricane City

9 Future Fossils

10 A Drowned World

Songs from the Sunken Lands

Acknowledgements

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Scan the QR code to listen to ‘Songs from the Sunken Lands’, an immersive soundtrack to the book.

See page 226 for further information.

1

CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD

One afternoon, a hunter named Nanabozho returned home from an arduous journey to find that his cousin was missing. He called his name, over and over, but heard no answer. His cousin’s hut was empty. A half-eaten meal lay abandoned on the table. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air.

Nanabozho noticed a trail of churned earth and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Immediately, he knew that his cousin had been kidnapped by his enemy, the Great Serpent.

The hunter followed the trail to a dark lake filled with evil spirits, including the Great Serpent himself. To lure the beast out of the lake, Nanabozho stopped the winds and asked the sun to beat down hard, hoping that the serpent would seek the coolness of the leafy, tree-lined shore. In readiness, Nanabozho transformed himself into a tree stump and waited.

As the lake warmed, the Great Serpent emerged, groggily, his scales flashing in the sunshine, and promptly fell asleep in the shade. Seizing his opportunity, Nanabozho shot an arrow into his heart. With a diabolical cry the wounded beast thrashed in the water, unleashing a great flood upon the land. As a tidal wave crashed through the villages and towns, drowning the terrified people, the dying serpent rode high above on the foaming crest, his fiery eyes glaring.

The flood waters continued to rise until only one mountain peak remained, where Nanabozho and a few other survivors took refuge. They built a raft to escape as the final piece of dry land vanished beneath the waves. Almost everything they knew was gone but for the birds that circled in the sky above them.

They drifted in despair for days and days until the waters began to recede and rugged peaks burst through the waves. Then they descended from the mountains to begin all over again.1

In 1984 an archaeologist was searching for submerged ruins in the Bay of Atlit on Israel’s Carmel coast. Ten metres below the surface of the sparkling blue Mediterranean waters, Ehud Galili’s team discovered seven megaliths on the seabed, clustered in a half-circle, tilted and eroded, but still standing after millennia under water, buffeted by the currents. Cup marks had been carefully carved into the stones, which surrounded the circular mouth of a freshwater well. Nearby, oval slabs were grooved with anthropomorphic symbols. Scattered across a 10-acre surrounding area were the walls of houses, paved plazas and graves full of bones. It was a lost world beneath the sea, untouched by human hands since it was flooded 9,000 years ago.

Gradually, Galili uncovered the remains of a village that was home to the farmers of a fertile plain, sown with wheat, grazed by domesticated animals. They crafted artefacts of bone, wood and stone. They buried their dead and carried out rituals at their sacred well,2 sharing ancestral stories in the shadow of the megaliths until rising seas submerged their homeland, forcing them to migrate. But archaeologists also found a clue that something more sudden and catastrophic might have occurred: piles of fish, ready for sale or storage, lay abandoned. An Italian research team led by Maria Pareschi of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology suggested that a volcanic eruption of Mount Etna sent a tsunami pounding through the settlement, laying all to waste in a matter of hours. British marine archaeologist Dr Sean Kingsley even claimed that this could be evidence of the event that inspired the biblical tale of Noah’s flood.

Atlit Yam is one of many sunken places around the globe that evoke wonder and speculation. Deep in the waters between Tunisia and Sicily, a 12-metre limestone monolith lies split in two, encrusted with barnacles, carved over 9,000 years ago, when that bank of seabed was an island. Off the eastern shore of the Croatian island of Korčula lies a 7,000-year-old road that was built by a lost maritime culture known as the Hvar. In the Arabian Sea stone pillars protrude at a location where the holy Hindu city of Dwarka, home to Lord Krishna, was believed to have sunk. Statues, goblets and sarcophagi are strewn on the sea floor of a bay west of the Nile, where the ancient Egyptian trading port of Thonis-Heracleion was guarded by the gigantic statue of Hapi, god of floods, taken down in a torrent of liquified soil when waters destroyed the city after an earthquake.

These are what remain of settlements from epochs when sea levels were hundreds of metres lower, their roads, walls and temples preserved in silt, along with tools, artworks and storage pits for meat and grains. These were centres of trade and agriculture, homes to gods, spirits and ancestors, abandoned to rising waters or destroyed by earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis. Quickly, they were covered by sand, colonised by crustaceans and seaweed, stalled in time, while high above, on dry land, civilisations rose and fell. For millennia, the stone faces of forgotten deities peered at passing sharks through fronds of kelp. Lobsters scuttled over pottery fragments. Molluscs burrowed into tree trunks, their bark intact, sap still flowing in their capillaries. Jellyfish drifted over the bones of deer and wild cattle in peat beds imprinted with the feet of Stone Age children.

From time to time, these remnants would emerge at low tide after storms, snag in fishing nets, or rise to the surface. For instance, when the ruins of a Roman holiday resort were spotted in the Bay of Naples after an expanding subterranean magma chamber forced them up into the glittering shallows. Or when a night of savage storms revealed wooden posts in a circle around a Neolithic sky-burial platform on a windswept Norfolk beach. Or when a North Sea trawler dredged up a Mesolithic spear point in a clump of peat, revealing a forgotten land that once connected Britain to Europe before a tsunami flooded it 8,000 years ago.

Some of these places might have vanished from the historical record or sunk in a tumult of fire and flood long before humans had even a concept of history. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were forgotten. Memories of settlements, hunting grounds and farmlands lost to rising waters, glacial floods and seismic cataclysms linger in folklore and cling to anomalies in the coastal topography. Flood stories form the root of mythologies across many cultures, going back to before ancient Sumerian times, and lie at the heart of all three major Abrahamic religions, hinting at traumatic experiences in our deep past, when the world became radically changed by runaway global warming.

Six hundred generations ago, our distant relatives experienced catastrophic flooding in a punishing series of climate shifts that began as the Ice Age came to an end sometime after 18,000 bce, when the world’s ice caps were at their furthest extent, known as the Last Glacial Maximum. First, there was a gradual warming period known as the Oldest Dryas, followed by the Bolling in which there was 300 years of super-accelerated heating, with melting glaciers, floods and sea levels rising by 16 metres. But just as the survivors adapted to the forests of birch and pine that flourished on once frozen tundra, the climate slammed into reverse. The world cooled for 600 years, sheets of ice surging back over the land. Another millennium of warming re-established the forests, but in 10,800 bce Earth was plunged into temperatures as cold as the Last Glacial Maximum.

One theory behind the Younger Dryas freeze is that a North American proglacial lake, containing meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet, was breached. A wall of water coursed through Washington State at 105 kilometres per hour, with aquatic tornadoes that scoured the rock like drills, carving the 100-kilometre-long Grand Coulee canyon. So much freshwater entered the sea that it altered the ocean’s salinity and switched off the Gulf Stream, the warm Atlantic Ocean current. Another theory is that a comet hit the Greenland Ice Sheet, sending a cloud of dust into the atmosphere, unleashing the mega-flood and casting the world into 1,300 years of winter. Scientists have unearthed evidence of this impact in a ‘black mat’ of nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, iridium, charcoal and soot – all signs of a high-heat event – in over ninety sites in North America and Greenland, carbon dated from 10,800 bce. Whatever the cause, the aftermath was devastating for life on Earth. Megafauna such as mammoths, giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats became extinct. Without a flow of warm Atlantic water moving northward, the ice sheets advanced and temperatures plummeted, rendering much of northern Europe and North America uninhabitable.

There may be traces of human experiences of this in some North American flood legends that exist today. The Pima from Arizona tell of an eagle that warned of a flood before a wall of water careered down the Gila valley, destroying all in its path. The Choctaw tells of a darkness that fell over the earth, bringing unhappiness to the people. When their shaman spotted a glimmer of light in the north, they were full of joy, until they realised it was a mountain of water rolling towards them. Or there’s the Ojibwa’s tale of the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star, which burned all the trees and turned the world cold. The same tribe also have the legend of Nanabozho and the Great Serpent.

In 9600 bce, the Gulf Stream was restored and the planet warmed again. Humans thrived as temperate deciduous forests returned, bringing nuts, fruits and edible plants. They settled on coasts and in river valleys, where there was an abundance of food and water. But with opportunity came peril. Global temperatures continued to soar and the seas continued to rise. Glaciers melted and proglacial lakes burst, unleashing floods that swamped low-lying Mesolithic plains. Peninsulas were reduced to archipelagos. Islands vanished. Land bridges disappeared. Forests turned to saltmarsh. As the colossal glaciers retreated, the land that had been depressed under their weight for so long began to rise. This phenomenon, known as isostatic rebound, unsettled Earth’s crust, triggering earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslips and tsunamis that annihilated settlements, sank islands and reshaped coastlines in a matter of hours.

The popular perception of Stone Age people is that they were savage, club-wielding wanderers, hanging out in caves and grunting incoherently. But this is far from the case. They played instruments, made art, traversed seas, traded wares and studied the stars. These are the kind of people that experienced climate change in the early Holocene – folk who were not so different from us living today. They bore witness to frightening and perplexing Earth changes. Important places that were home to their gods and ancestors, monuments and hunting grounds, slipped beneath the waves. Communities were forced to migrate and begin again. It is likely that their stories about what happened were passed on down through the generations. In the north of Australia, for example, where the shoreline was drowned at the rate of 5 kilometres a year, Aboriginal peoples assimilated their experiences into their library of oral lore, the Dreaming. Many of its stories relate to flooding and describe land bridges that have long been submerged, including forests that stretched out to promontories that could only have existed between 9,960 and 13,310 years ago.3

There are over 2,000 known global flood myths, and these stories of catastrophic inundation can be found at the roots of many cultures and religions. For instance, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet collapsed 9,400 years ago, it dumped a massive volume of water into the oceans, raising the level of Mediterranean Sea. It breached a rock barrier in the Bosporus valley and entered the lake with a force ‘two hundred times that of Niagara Falls’,4 flooding 100,000 square kilometres of land over 300 days, creating the Black Sea. Some archaeologists believe this might have been the basis of oral traditions that influenced the Old Testament tale of Noah, gifted with foresight by God, who escapes with his wife and children in a boat laden with the male and female of every animal species. There is a similar story in ancient Greek legend where Zeus tells a man named Deucalion to build an ark before he floods the world, while Hindu texts from the sixth century bce describe how the god Vishnu takes the form of a fish and tells the first man, Manu, to construct a boat before the deluge. It might have been one great flood that inspired all these myths, or a combination of cataclysms during the turbulent millennia of global warming between the Last Glacial Maximum and the end of the Bronze Age.

Natural disasters impacted not just hunter gatherers but civilised societies in built environments, such as the Mesopotamian city of Ur, constructed on a lowland swamp, flooded by the Euphrates in 3500 bce. This might have influenced The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem recorded on stone tablets in 2100 bce, which tells of Utnapishtim, who was granted immortality after surviving a flood in a boat containing many species of animals. Even more calamitous was the volcanic eruption that tore apart the Greek island of Santorini circa 1600 bce, home to a Minoan city of public roads, sewers and multi-storey houses, which some believe could be the source of the Atlantis legend told by the philosopher Plato. Afterwards, a giant wave crashed through the islands of the Aegean, heralding the end of the Minoan civilisation.

The stories told about these hugely traumatic, socially transformative events preserved them in the collective memory, where they became refined into myth, exaggerated and embellished over generations of retelling. Mutated traces of these ancient experiences entered the religious texts, philosophical works and folkloric literature that still resonate in our modern culture.

We are the children of the flood. All of us living today are descended from those who saw their lands drowned, civilisations crumble and populations scatter. Floods linger deep in our cultural memory. They ripple through songs, prayers and stories about a time of great disaster, when an old world died in violence, and a new one was born. I remember sitting in a circle of children on a musty rug in a schoolroom in 1979, singing ‘The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock’. At the chorus line ‘the rains came down’, we mimicked falling raindrops with our waggling fingers and at the line ‘the floods came up’, we lifted our palms forcefully to the ceiling to represent the rising waters. Then we all clapped our hands as we sang ‘The Animals Went in Two by Two’. I already knew well the story of Noah’s Ark, and the lethal deluge sent by God. So I belted it out with gusto in the hope that such a disaster would never again befall humankind.

In my early childhood I was fascinated by sunken kingdoms and lost prehistoric worlds. I loved films like The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They inspired the stories I began to write at the age of seven. My first, The Travel to the Underwater Palace, was scrawled in a lined notebook and began like this: ‘An old man sat in an old rocking chair and told three sailors about an underwater palace. “I warn you, though,” he said, “you will have to go through some dangerous lands.”’

My story was about a crew of sailors, led by Captain Doom and Captain Boar, who adventure through islands populated by demons, dinosaurs and cavemen in pursuit of a fabled palace. I never made it clear whether it was built above water, then submerged, or constructed on the seabed. All I remember is that I fantasised about a city beneath the ocean. My cover art depicted the palace as an ornate tower, decorated with colourful fish scales, crested with a golden spire like a narwhal horn. When they finally spot the spire after a perilous journey, the sailors dance on the deck with excitement but Captain Boar stands at the bow, staring at it in silence. This was a strangely melancholic note in an otherwise mercilessly violent tale of derring-do. Perhaps it was my unconscious response to the eeriness of absence that characterises sunken places; that insatiable yearning to see the invisible.

I had recently moved to the English county of Derbyshire, in which the village of Derwent was flooded to make way for the Ladybower Reservoir, leaving only a protruding church spire to mark its watery grave. There are similar sights across the world: in Venezuela, where the spire of Potosi’s church pokes above the water after the town was flooded for a dam; in Romania, where the village of Geamana was flooded to make way for a copper mine, leaving its church spire jutting from a toxic soup; and in northern Italy, where a fourteenth-century church tower looms over the waters of Lago di Resia. Either I had seen one of these images as a young child or I had intuitively used this iconic motif in The Travel to the Underwater Palace. Further evidence that I had unwittingly tuned into some kind of folkloric narrative current can be seen in my follow-up story, The Secret Island, which began like this: ‘A boat sailed across the ocean, when an island rose up from the sea. The island had been under water for one hundred years.’ This description was startlingly similar to the Celtish myth of Hy-Brasil, an enchanted ghost island in the Atlantic to the west of Ireland that was said to emerge for one day every seven years. I had never heard of that legend but perhaps my imagination had accessed a collective consciousness of flooded worlds, passed down through hundreds of generations since the Ice Age.

Decades after my schoolboy notebook novels, my relationship with sunken lands was rekindled when I moved into a house near the Lea Valley marshes in east London. Most of the marshland had been reclaimed for football pitches, reservoirs and industrial estates. But there were patches of waterlogged land, populated by herons and cormorants, untouched since the last Ice Age, offering a glimpse of an antediluvian world beneath the asphalt plateau of the city. The topography was haunted by fragments of the past, buried in the ooze. A dugout canoe. A rhino horn. A flint tool. Local legends told of phantom bears and crocodiles lurking in the undergrowth. It was as if the prehistoric past coexisted with the present. But it was the future that seemed to haunt the marshes most. The Lower Lea Valley is a floodplain, and it is only a matter of time before it is inundated. Scientific projections of sea-level rise put the area under water by 2050. As I wandered the marshes I imagined that one day a great wave might surge down the Thames and roll up the River Lea, submerging railway bridges, houses and warehouses, leaving only the tops of electricity pylons jutting from the surface. My first book, Marshland, described my strange experiences walking the Lower Lea Valley and ended with a speculative tale about this flood, where sea creatures slithered over drowned football fields, following long-lost tidal currents.

When I moved to Hastings on the south coast of England, I found myself in a nexus of sunken landscapes. To the east, the marshland of Romney lay hunkered behind grassy dykes and concrete walls. To the west, the Pevensey Levels, a tidal bay in Roman times, was a flatland criss-crossed with water channels and ditches, prone to flooding, protected temporarily by 9 kilometres of shingle sea defences. I liked to sit on the cliff by the ruined Norman castle near my house and look over the English Channel, where Stone Age hunters once roamed a forest that now lies beneath the fish and the ferries. On the nearby beach of Pett Level, remnants of that forest were revealed at low tide, a chaos of algae-smeared stumps and severed branches, the grain of the ancient wood still visible. Out towards the shingle spit of Dungeness was the location of old Winchelsea, a medieval town that was destroyed by storm tides and forever covered by the sea. Behind it, sheep grazed on fields threatened with re-submergence.

This layered landscape told a story about cycles of change going back into prehistory, in which human beings had to cope with great loss and adapt to new circumstances. It inspired my second book, The Stone Tide, an autobiographical novel set on the crumbling East Sussex coast, about how the structures in our lives, which we perceive as being so solid and enduring, are actually transient and ever shifting. Afterwards, tales of floods continued to feature in my weird horror stories, like nightmares I couldn’t shake off.

During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, I spent time on the beach of Pett Level with my two young daughters. As the girls ran over the bones of the drowned Mesolithic forest, I felt a connection to that lost prehistoric world, as if we were part of a story ongoing since the Ice Age, when other fathers of other daughters faced up to the threats of their time as waters inundated their cherished homelands and their world became inexplicably transformed. I saw the ancient flood flow into a future flood in which this beach would one day return to the seabed and I wondered what would remain of this moment in time. What clues might someone find when the waters drew back again? What trace residues of our hopes and fears might exist in the story of this place? What might they learn of our joy and our suffering in a time of environmental breakdown and climate change? Because there was no escaping the reality that similar events were taking our own civilisation to the brink.

The following summer, I watched in helpless horror as the world flooded. Torrential rains in Europe swelled rivers until they burst their banks. Wild water rapids whirled down residential streets in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, hurling cars into houses and uprooting trees. The earth was turned into a filthy soup, flowing at terrifying speeds through villages and towns. ‘Everything broken, swept away, it’s a catastrophe,’ lamented a seventy-six-year-old woman from the village of Schuld, as disorientated crayfish crawled down mucilaginous streets strewn with household appliances and rubber tyres.5 In Erftstadt-Blessem, a sinkhole opened, sucking pavements and lamp posts into its deadly vortex. Cascades of gluey mud encased lawns, playgrounds and tennis courts. Gravestones poked from a sea of sludge in a decimated cemetery. Bridges on the River Ahr buckled in the torrent, cracked slabs of asphalt dripping with foliage and plastic bags. When the waters receded, cars lay upside-down in fields, trucks abandoned in drifts of splintered timber. ‘My city looks like a battle has taken place,’ said a resident of Rheinbach. Observing the grisly aftermath, an emergency chaplain from Bonn said, ‘We live in a society that thinks it can control nature. And now people are feeling powerless against it. We have to be afraid of water and fire, like our ancestors 40,000 years ago. That’s very difficult for people to understand.’6

That same summer, extreme rainfall triggered flash floods in Dharamshala, India, sweeping away buildings and cars. In China, floods in Henan province killed almost 400 people. A tunnel in Zhengzhou city filled with floodwater, trapping the terrified drivers inside it, while passengers in a metro train screamed as water seeped through the carriage doors. In the USA, Hurricane Ida’s storm surge smashed through homes in the Mississippi Delta. Weeks later, a cyclone flooded Chesapeake Bay and water flowed through the streets of Washington DC, Baltimore and Annapolis. In October, a flood in Nepal killed over a hundred and displaced thousands in the Mahakali River basin. A gigantic plume of water vapour spread over Pacific skies and unleashed itself on Canada, submerging swathes of southern British Columbia. In the aftermath, the hulks of farm buildings loomed from floodwater lakes, bristling with telegraph poles, among the emergent humps of bridges and flyovers. Travellers were stranded in a town named Hope where all routes out were blocked by landslides. Meanwhile yet another high tide flooded Miami, Florida. ‘The USA is SINKING!’ proclaimed a YouTube video of cars moving through rising waters.

Floods were on the news every week, one flowing into another until all the world became a deluge, viewed on rolling social media newsfeeds from the sanctuary of my house on a hill. The video footage looked like the montages from those worst-case-scenario ‘what if’ documentaries I watched when I was younger: palm trees bent double in hurricane-force winds; wooden houses disintegrating into raging torrents; boats beached on roofs; waves sweeping through city streets. It was the stuff of nightmares. My worst fears about climate change were coming to bear in a way that seemed hyper-real, like a Hollywood disaster movie with exaggerated plots, accelerated timelines and disproportionate scales. It was suddenly easy to see how the experience of similar climate disasters in prehistory might give birth to epic myths and legends.

They used to call these ‘freak weather events’ but in the past two decades they have become the norm. Global warming has pushed the world’s weather to new extremes. Hotter oceans and warmer air increase the frequency and intensity of storm events. Ferocious hurricanes are unleashing more rain than ever. As the oceans heat, the water expands and sea levels rise, making coastal towns and cities more vulnerable to storm surges. And worse is to come. Global temperatures are predicted to rise by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Even if the industrialised nations were to take all the required action to reduce emissions, there is no way, say climate scientists, to stop the ice caps melting. The Greenland Ice Sheet has passed the point of no return. Half the glacial ice in Central Europe and North America will be gone in the next few decades, dramatically raising sea levels. Climate Central, which creates digital maps of projected submergences across the world, reveals that by 2050 the following cities could be under water: Amsterdam, Basra, New Orleans, Venice, Kolkata and Ho Chi Minh City. These aren’t fringe communities but the densely populated nuclei of modern civilisation; repositories of cultural history, architecture and art, doomed to sink. And this isn’t some speculative future catastrophe. It’s happening now. In Jakarta, Indonesia, half-submerged houses have been abandoned to encroaching waters. Fish have colonised the waters in an abandoned shopping mall in Bangkok, a city under almost constant flood alert during the rainy season. In the low-lying areas of Mumbai, India, the underpasses and subways fill with water after heavy rains and waves crash over sea walls. In Alexandria, Egypt, winter storm surges pour into the cafes along the seafront where a concrete wall has been built as a last bastion against the inevitable.

Inspired by these troubling global events, I decided to embark on an exploration of sunken lands, past and present, real and mythical, to try to understand better our climate disaster and what it means when a civilisation faces radical transformation, or even annihilation, by unstoppable natural forces. For two years, I journeyed to drowned forests, shrinking wetlands, vanishing islands and sinking towns, beginning in the south of England, moving north-west to Wales, south-east to Italy and then west, out across the Atlantic to the United States of America. I followed the footsteps of the dead through sand, clay and silt, and placed my hands on rocks and trees touched by those who lived thousands of years before recorded history. I dived through shoals of fish to touch ancient ruins in Mediterranean waters. I engrossed myself in tales of lost worlds, destroyed by geological and climatic changes, from rising seas and tsunamis to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Some were the inventions of people trying to make sense of tree stumps that appeared on beaches at low tide, or anomalous post-glacial rock formations, presumed to be the ruins of legendary cities. Some were trace folk memories of real Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman settlements, land bridges, islands and lowlands sunk by earthquakes and floods; transformed into legends like those of Ys, Lyonesse, Atlantis and the Lowland Hundred. In these tales, arrogant cultures dismiss warnings that they must mend their decadent ways and live harmoniously with the natural world, only for their walls to collapse and the seas to roll in. Similar narratives were being repeated in towns and cities flooding today; ongoing traumas from which shoots of future folklore might grow through the ages, just as children still sing of Noah’s Ark.

As a writer I have long been fascinated by the way mythology and folklore evolve and adapt to new environments and cultures. The flood events occurring now may become legends in hundreds or even thousands of years, told by people who no longer remember our civilisation, but who intuitively understand the warnings encoded in the folklore. Perhaps such stories will help them avoid our terrible mistakes, much like those gnarly sculptures intended to warn future generations away from nuclear dumping sites, transmitting a universal message of horror that’s likely to endure for epochs. This is why the tales we tell ourselves about what is happening in the world right now, and why it is happening, are so important.

To tell my version of the story, I visit an impoverished neighbourhood of New Orleans, almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, where houses are built on stilts; a First Nation settlement in the Louisiana wetland that is falling into the sea, its houses abandoned and refugees scattered; a submerged Roman party town in the caldera of a volcano; a rapidly sinking village on the coast of Wales near the site of a legendary lost city; an Atlantic archipelago threatened by saltwater intrusions and storm waves; drained former wetlands in England’s East Anglia, formed from the mulch of a sunken forest, shrinking far below protective dykes as an ascendent North Sea pounds. These places are where the effects of global warming are most apparent – and most urgent – from rising sea levels to extreme rainfall and storm surges. They give us a stark glimpse of the future on a rapidly transforming planet. But they also tell a story about the unavoidability of change, the necessity of harmonising with nature’s flux and the folly of trying to control it. In these threshold zones, water and land are embraced in eternal cycles of flood and reclamation, erosion and deposit, destruction and renewal. Forests become freshwater swamps. Swamps become saltmarshes. Saltmarshes become the seabed. The seabed becomes stone. Stone becomes the bedrock on which future forests grow.

Sunken lands show us that there have been many ends of the world, going back into the deep past. But the end is also a beginning, another turn of the wheel. Nothing really dies; it just changes. There have been many cultures who have endured global warming and survived the flood. If we peel back the layers of silt, sea and mythology, we can sometimes hear their ancestral voices and remember valuable lessons that have been forgotten.

2

THE FOREST BENEATH THE SEA

For as long as they could remember, they had lived by the river. One of several tribes in a verdant forest, they were tall and dark skinned with pot bellies, sated by the land that nourished them. They hunted red deer, wild boars and otters. They felled trees to build huts and boats. They collected berries, nuts and mushrooms, but only enough to sustain the web of life around them. They knew when it was the right time to pick, and the right time to let things grow; how much to cut and how much to kill. For all things were connected – the trees, the rocks, the plants – and to disrupt one was to disrupt all. Life was the water that flowed through everything, like the river through the forest, negotiating its eternal course.

One balmy evening they sat around the fire as musicians played tunes on bone flutes and beat a rhythm on hollow gourds. Stars sparkled in the black sky. The moon hung pale above the trees, strung out in heaven’s high bower. All was bright and alive. But then they heard an unfamiliar sound: a thunderous cacophony of splintering wood amid an escalating roar. They looked around in panic. Some got to their feet and peered into the trees for signs of danger. Others drew their children close as the tumult swelled into a deafening crescendo.

In astonishment, they saw the river level plummet. For an eerie moment its exposed mudbanks gleamed in the glow of the campfire, writhing with silvery fish. That was all the tribe had time to comprehend before the river returned in a waist-high wall of foaming brown water. It smashed into their encampment in a torrent of branches, stones, moss, badgers, bears, cattle and deer; water-borne torpedo corpses that took out trees, huts and humans alike, swirling all living and non-living things together into a lethal soup and carrying it away through the sinking land.

It was difficult to picture a forest as I looked from the south coast of England over a sparkling sea towards a horizon busy with ferries and container ships. I was on the beach at Pett Level, a long arc of shingle, striated with wooden groynes, running from the foot of sandstone cliffs through a flatland of sheep towards the saltmarsh of Rye and the Camber sand dunes. Propping up the rear of the beach was the spine of a 3-kilometrelong earthwork defence where walkers stooped into the wind. To the east was the spit of Dungeness, its cuboid nuclear reactors silver against the blue sky, wind turbines spinning in the fields behind it. Under the silt before me lay forgotten habitats from a time when hunters stalked game through a forest of alder, willow, ash, birch and oak that ranged out towards France. The last of these trees were submerged three and a half thousand years ago but their stumps could still be seen embedded in clumps of peat on the shore at low tide.

My daughters and I were living on top of a sandstone promontory in neighbouring Hastings. It was a Tuesday morning in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic and the schools were closed. The girls were going stir crazy after weeks cooped up indoors, so I improvised a geography trip to the sunken forest. We piled into the car with our cocker spaniel Hendrix, and drove ten minutes east, where the road fell away to reveal a crescent of lowland, once a medieval tidal bay that turned to saltmarsh, later reclaimed for farming and holiday parks. A country lane took us through the village of Pett to the car park of the Smuggler’s Inn. It had closed many years previously but there was still a sign outside offering a deal on burgers.

Despite the sunshine, the air was icy as we crunched on the shingle beneath sodden brown cliffs. Where the stones gave way to sand, we stepped onto a slippery expanse of peat. At first, it looked like rock, but when we kicked our heels into the surface, we revealed the malleable pitch-black sludge of the former forest floor. Occasionally we sank ankle deep into pockets of ooze. The intertidal actions of the sea had dredged tiny canals in the peat, through which water tumbled into foaming pools, littered with scallop and razor-clam shells. All around us were the remnants of trees; a woodland war zone as far as the eye could see: truncated oaks with splayed roots surrounded by toppled trunks, long as boat masts, draped in gutweed and bladderwrack. Some were skeletal ribs in the sand, while others – thick as a human leg – were strewn on the surface, as if a caber-tosser had gone berserk. Multiple thousands of pockmarks covered the mass of peat and wood: the work of the common piddock, clam-like creatures that burrow into self-created tombs, where they spend their whole lives, feeding on organic matter washed in by the currents, and illuminating the darkness with a blue-green light. When they die, they leave behind empty holes that become homes to other molluscs in search of shelter. The cycles of life and death, disaster and opportunity, revolved over many millennia in this landscape.

In his book Submerged Forests (1913) the palaeobotanist Clement Reid described how fishermen up and down the coastline of Britain had for centuries told tales of tree stumps rooted in peaty earth, revealed between tides after storms. They were known as ‘Noah’s Woods’ by locals, who assumed that these oaks and hazels were lost to the same flood that God unleashed on humankind in the Old Testament. Proof, surely, that what the Bible said was true. But the problem was, wrote Reid, that while some might explain them away with the notion of a biblical flood, ‘it was difficult thus to account for trees rooted in their original soil, and yet now found well below the level of high tide’. To consider this was to throw out the chronology of the Bible and confront the dizzying implications of deep time, where the planet had experienced myriad geological shifts and sea-level changes going way back before human memory.

I showed my daughters that some of the wooden matter was soft enough to push a finger into. If you were to do so, I said, you might touch the same spot another child had touched long ago, before Jesus was born. These were part of a forest that grew here when Britain was not an island but joined to Europe by a landmass known as Doggerland, and when this part of the English Channel, just south of the Strait of Dover, was a river valley that had been gouged through chalk by a mega-flood 400,000 years previously.

The world looked very different at that time. Massive sheets of ice covered Canada, Scandinavia and northern Europe. With so much water locked in continental glaciers, the sea level was 125 metres lower, exposing coastal shelves, valleys and land bridges, traversed by giant deer, woolly rhinos and hippos. Across a tract of tundra from Spain to China, mammoths grazed on grasses and willow shrubs. Camels, giant beaver and bison wandered a steppe between Alaska and eastern Siberia. In the south-eastern woodlands of North America, lions and sabre-toothed cats prowled, while aurochs and red deer roamed the plains between Britain and northern Europe. Among these beasts were humans, hunting and migrating, adapting to the advance of ice and then to its retreat.

As the climate warmed, the glaciers melted and the seas rose. The withdrawal of ice removed an enormous weight off the land in Scotland and northern England. As the northern lands bounced back up, the south of England, which had been a bulge at the edge of an ice sheet, tilted downwards. This isostatic movement gradually sank Doggerland, year by year, while the ascendant seas flooded its hunting grounds and migratory routes, including the river valley in the Strait of Dover at its southernmost reaches. Then in 6200 bce came the big one. A series of three submarine landslides off the coast of Norway triggered a tsunami that permanently flooded many coastal and lowland settlements around Britain and Europe, turning Doggerland into an offshore sand bank. Some historians believe that the Storegga Slides might have been the event that turned Britain into an island.

It is impossible to know whether some of the Stone Age people in the lowlands died violently, or if the inundation was gradual enough for them to flee. Either way, their homelands slipped beneath the water, never to be seen again – until 1931, when a North Sea fishing trawler dredged up a barbed harpoon made of red-deer antler. Since then, hundreds of objects have been raised from the seabed, including petrified hyena droppings, mammoth molars and a fragment of Neanderthal skull. Seismic surveys and digital modelling have revealed a complex topography of densely wooded valleys, marshlands and lagoons, inhabited by humans for thousands of years, then lost to memory – but not, perhaps, to the imagination. Long before its rediscovery, H. G. Wells conjured up a prescient vision of Doggerland in ‘A Story of the Stone Age’, published in the Idler magazine in 1897.

‘This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history,’ Wells wrote, ‘a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.’1 Perhaps Wells was inspired by tales of submerged trees glimpsed off the English coast, or perhaps his imagination had intuitively accessed an ancestral cultural memory embedded in his DNA. This might sound outlandish, but animal studies have shown that experiences of fear and trauma can be passed down through generations in a form of genetic memory, a process known as ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’.2 Each one of us embodies the accumulated behavioural modifications of our species, and those other hominids which came before us and bred with us when we co-existed on the planet. The human genus has evolved through radically changing climates and ecosystems, adapting new behaviours after confronting new existential challenges, of which the palaeotsunami that transformed Britain was a very recent one in its 2.8-million-year history.

In the English Channel, 160 kilometres west of Pett Level, archaeologists have discovered artefacts contemporaneous with the Storegga Slides. In 1999, divers surveying the seabed near the Isle of Wight saw a lobster digging up manmade tools. Excavations revealed evidence of a settlement dating back 8,000 years, including flints, string, hearths and burnt wood. Divers from the Maritime Archaeology Trust have since found split timbers and the wooden foundations of a circular building, indicating the use of crafting technologies far beyond the capabilities expected of that time. They have declared it the world’s oldest boat-building site and the ‘most cohesive, wooden Stone Age structure ever found in the UK’.3 Further studies around the Isle of Wight site have found the DNA of einkorn wheat. This variety was dominant in the eastern Mediterranean 10,000 years ago, which means that this was an imported crop, brought to the south of England on boats over huge distances.4 Therefore, the people who experienced the flood in 6200 bce were more sophisticated and worldly than we might imagine.

The tribes living in the forest valley now under the English Channel would have made it their home, coppicing and burning to encourage the growth of nutritious hazel trees and edible plants, filling it with ancestors and spirits, storying the landscape with myths, constructing tools, dwellings, structures for worship and boats. But as global warming continued to reshape the world, the encroaching sea forced them to migrate to higher ground. Layers of silt encased their abandoned settlements in a preservative, oxygen-free sludge for thousands of years, allowing twenty-first-century researchers to touch the remnants of campfires as if they were extinguished only yesterday.

As I gazed out over the sea from Pett Level, I thought about the artefacts that might be concealed in mummified chambers on the seabed and imagined what their owners might think if