Blog
ResourceS for Adaptation to rising sea levels and sinking cities.
This is a blog containing images, stories, songs, rituals and traditions related to flooding and flood protection from the cultural heritage of coasts worldwide. It is continuously expanded and meant as a free repository to be used by anyone working to increase resilience and well-being for front line communitiies.
Please browse through the posts or search for themes, places or centuries using the Categories. Any email comments, hints or repostings are very much appreciated by the author.
Stuck in Room 48 – John Wyndham’s “Day of the Triffids”
Sometimes pulp fiction tells you so much more than academic papers can. As in the first pages of John Wyndham's classic Sci-Fi novel "The Day...
Architectural Transience
The city of Görlitz in the Lausatia region of Germany is famous for it's architectural heritage. The Holy Grave, also referred to as Görtlitz...
San Francisco (1936)
The movie "San Francisco" is considered the first real Disaster Movie out of Hollywood. The film premiered in 1936, exactly 30 years after the San...
The Ice Drift of 1784
Historic water mark in a staircase in the Bonner Münster marking the 1784 flood level. Cities in the Rhine region in west Germany have been subject...
Miller’s Apocalypse and Climate Doom
Today stories and movies about the apocalypse are ubiqius. Fueled by climate anxiety and a general sense of uncertainty and instability, the genre...
Proximity and distance in disaster representation
What we know about disasters, we know from the media. The medium forms the message, so media forms the disaster, what we think it is and – maybe –...
White Man’s Hole
Considering that surface temperatures in many places across the globe will rise significantly in average due to global warming, this little town in...
The Great Smog
Extreme Weather and politics in Britain in 1952 as seen in the series The Crown. This is from Season 1, episode 4, released in 2016.
Flood lament from 1784
The winter of 1783/1784 was extremely cold in central Europe. When the unusually large amount of snow and ice melted in the spring, many German...
Venexia
Eventually I will have to stop collecting comics about Venice - there are simply too many. It's no wonder comic artists are attracted to Venice. As...
The Melt Down (1977)
The Man from Atlantis was a TV series that cashed in on the popularity of underwater films in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though the series didn't run...
The Last Wave (1977)
This is a 1977 Australian movie about a series of freak storms in Sidney. It was Peter Weir’s second major film after the success of “Picnic at...
Colonial and native Tall Tales
Extraordinary natural occurrences and appearances were traditionally explained in myths, legends or so called Tall Tales. They fall in the larger...
Material and spiritual barriers
Sculpture of fish god from Lepenski Vir, likely to have been part of the people’s spiritual responses to flooding. Credit: Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia...
Qingyuan flooded, April 2024
These images are from news reports from the metropolis in the Guangdong province, Southern China. The region experienced massive floodings in April...
Power and disaster
In Greek and Roman Antiquity extreme weather events and natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes and floods were a frequent occurrence. They...
Noah’s Ark on a silver coin
This silver coin was printed in 1737 to celebrate the end of the flood and famine in Silesia in 1736/1737. The front shows the biblical scene of the...
Ammianus Marcellinus on the tsunami of 365 CE
This is the famous section from the 28. book of the "Res Gestae", the history written by Roman historian Ammianus who lived from around 330 - 400...
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...
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...