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 - what it is like to be in it. While for millenia natural disasters remained engimatic for the very practical reason that...
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 Kia Vahland has recently written in a German newspaper article: "The principle of resilience through beauty has a long...
Sculpture of fish god from Lepenski Vir, likely to have been part of the people’s spiritual responses to flooding. Credit: Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia Commons In a beautiful article from 2019, Patrick Nunn gives a couple of examples for protection architecture that...
In a comic book by French authors Benoit Sokal and Francois Schuiten from 2022, an ancient maritime myth is picked up in a comic format. The story is about a small community of refugees who once settled on the back of a giant whale floating in the ocean. The animal is...
"When you could walk from London to Paris to get a Croissant for breakfast..." (Jeff Goodell) Land bridge between the mainland and Britain - Doggerland and Dogger Bank. Comparison of the geographical situation in 2000 to the late years of the Vistula-Würm Glaciation....
There is a beautifully written passage on the submerged continent and city Atlantis to be found in Jules Verne's famous novel published in French in 1869/1870. The English translation of the chapter is available online. For simplicity reasons I simply copy the link to...
Continental Shelf Station was an attempt at creating an environment in which people could live and work on the sea floor. Precontinent has been used to describe the set of projects to build an underwater "village" carried out by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his team in...
In 1783 an unsual seismic event sequence occured along the Strait of Messina between the island Sicily and mainland Italy. Katrin Kleemann from LMU Munich writes: "Between 5. February and 28. March 1783, five strong earthquakes shook Calabria and Sicily and were...
Gédéon Reverdin: Étude dessinée d'après le tableau d'une Scène de Déluge peint par A.L. Girodet (1828). Here is the original painting by Girodet from 1806.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnDxZsxHzdw "Le roi d'Ys" is an opera by French composer Édouard Lalo (1823 – 1892), to a libretto by Édouard Blau, based on the old Breton legend of the drowned city of Ys (assumed geographical location).