During my [near-death] experience…I was also shown events that are likely to happen in the near future, but was made to understand that nothing is absolutely fixed and that everything depends on how we choose to use our own free will, that even those events that are already predestined can be changed or modified by a change in our own way of relating to them.

Margot Grey: Return From Death, 1985

 

About the year 2115, everywhere around the globe, ocean waters continue expanding from absorbed heat…

 

Let us now with reasonable logic project from very certain existing trends, documented well beyond any slightest doubt, to a future scenario over the next three hundred years.  A mere three hundred years – the same brief slice of time as the industrial revolution from which we’re just now emerging.

 

We begin with acknowledgement that everywhere around the earth the oceans are now warming, expanding and rising, their salinity declining from the freshwater input, their acidity increasing as chemical runoff and absorbed carbon dioxide conspire to make carbonic acid, which kills shellfish. These trends are fully documented by science and grow more exact by the month. Because of the rising ocean levels, several small low-lying island nations in the Pacific and Indian oceans are quite publicly planning for removal of their populations to higher ground before 2050. In the meantime they are at increasing risk from increasingly higher storm surges that increasingly severe typhoons may send their way. In all its many ramifications, the entire global warming trend is best described by the word “increasing.”

 

Worldwide fishing industries in contrast are making no plans to stop harvesting the fish and shellfish their income depends on. As whole species fall victim to the increasing acidity and increasing depletion from overfishing and disappear, gone forever extinct, the fisherman switch their nets increasingly to whatever species remain that are good enough to eat. In this, they are responding logically to the increasing demands of new hungry mouths to feed because of the rapidly increasing world population.

 

A century from now, about 2115, everywhere around the globe, ocean waters continue expanding from absorbed heat, further increasing the rise already caused by melting glaciers. Both rise and expansion are well understood to be happening because of heating induced by CO₂ we humans dumped into the world atmosphere over recent centuries. Iceland’s mighty Vatnajokull glacier and America’s Glacier National Park are no more. Worldwide most of the other glaciers are gone. Those remaining melt faster every year, cubic miles of their precious fresh water draining daily down into the briny seas.

 

Few people understood how serious, how consequential, was sea level rise of a mere few millimeters when multiplied by that three-quarters of the earth’s surface which is oceans. Fewer still understood the danger in those millimeters. By 2115 a century’s accumulated sea level rise is measured not in millimeters or inches but in feet and meters. In 2115 Earth’s atmosphere and all her oceans are, on average, several degrees warmer than a century ago. Even if past leaders had somehow summoned the will to seriously reduce CO₂ emissions early enough – alas they did not – a delayed reaction would still occur. Even when the CO₂ pollution stopped – as inevitably it would, one way or another – the greenhouse heat would continue rising for decades before it finally peaked, held and, some future day, started slowly back down. By 2115 that course has been certain for 140 years.

 

The oceans’ rise is between three and seven feet, depending where on earth you measure. The world’s oceans don’t all rise the same amount at the same time. They slosh around, pile up in places. The influx of so very much new melt water has severely changed the old ocean currents, the dynamics of erosion, the way storm surges have their impact on every mile of coastline around the world. Huge old cities on all coasts are abandoned or being abandoned. New Orleans was among the first of them as the rising Gulf of Mexico encroached onto our southern coast. Progressively submerging the delta and its coastal flanks, salty waters extend ever more northward up the lower Mississippi basin.

 

Some rogue nations actually still burned coal, natural gas and oil to produce power and drive vehicles as recently as 2075, only forty years ago. Their CO2 hangs around. Added to what our great-grandparents put up there, it will be with us a long, long time yet.

 

The atmosphere grows yet warmer, every year. Surviving ice, melting even faster, prominently includes the giants on the Himalayas, Greenland, Antarctica. When they go, sea-level consequences will be so awful we cannot imagine it. We know only that the additional rise will be measured not in tens of feet, but in hundreds.

 

Those old political ideologues who failed to act, whose inaction and even opposition to action caused this world catastrophe, are all dead and forgotten.

 

 

Another century passes. In 2215, the first quarter of the 23rd century, the much warmed Gulf waters are still expanding, still rising. No longer does a great Mississippi delta reach out into the Gulf. A broad new estuary, a wide-mouthed southern version of old Chesapeake Bay, has drowned the delta along with the nation’s entire central underbelly. Salt water now extends more than two hundred miles up the Mississippi basin, spreading miles on each side beyond the old banks. Hundreds of square miles of the flat once-fertile farmlands along both sides of the old river channel are long submerged. Out on the edges new wetlands expand farther east and west every year, salt water saturation ruining the ground for farming despite the big river’s massive fresh water flow down the center.

 

Water is very heavy, as known by anyone who ever hefted a five-gallon bucket of it. Year by year, the expanding lower Mississippi estuary has added enormous new weight atop the lower reaches of the New Madrid seismic zone. The overburden pressure of this colossal new water-weight laying heavy upon the land extends an additional two hundred miles west, east…and north. And so inevitably, in a manner not altogether unlike the small earth tremors which occur beneath the weight of large glaciers, the increasing weight of water in the estuary’s northern reaches eventually becomes so heavy that it triggers an earthquake near the zone’s southern end.

 

In late autumn of 2215, the weakest southern section in the New Madrid aulacogen breaks and shatters, suddenly, without warning…