A fairy tale as collected by the Brothers Grimm: A little louse and a little flea kept house together. They were brewing beer in an eggshell when the little louse fell in and burned herself to death. At this the little flea began to cry loudly. Then the little parlor...
The Great Flood of Gun-Yu (Chinese: 鯀禹治水), also known as the Gun-Yu myth, was a major flood event in ancient China that allegedly continued for at least two generations, which resulted in great population displacements among other...
In this 1936 classic Sci-Fi novel (english title: The Drowned Cities), Romanian author Felix Aderca describes a future, when global cooling has forced humans to flee the Earth's surface, rebuilding civilization on the seafloor, accessing the heat of...
To answer the never-tiring desire for more space for residential buildings along the coasts - nearly 50% of the industrialized world now lives within a kilometer of the coast - floating structures are repeatedly discussed in urbanization discourse. So called VLFS,...
This is a popular German legend about Vineta and how the city reappears every hundred years for a day. I have not found an author to this version of the legend and also no professional english translation yet. Two motives appear in many versions of the legend: There...
This is the version from Ludwig Bechsteins collection of German Legends from 1853: Bei der Insel Usedom ist eine Stelle im Meere, eine halbe Meile von der Stadt gleichen Namens, da ist eine große, reiche und schöne Stadt versunken, die hieß Vineta. Sie war ihrer Zeit...
Vineta is a mythical sunken city off the German or Polish North Sea Coast. I was suprised to find out that the first mention of Vineta can be found in the travel writings of Ibrahim ibn Yaqub from around 960 CE. According to historians, Ibn Yaqub was a traveler and...
Divine punishment is an ever recuring theme in urban disasters. However, sometimes the situation does not quite fit the morals. In 1906 an earth quake hit the San Franscisco region. Fires broke out in the city, 3.000 citizens lost their lifes and 80% of the city's...
German annalist and farmer Peter Sax (1597 - 1662) wrote about the North Sea flood of October 11th 1634: „Um sechs Uhr am abend fing Gott der Herr aus dem Osten mit Wind und Regen zu wettern, um sieben wendete er den Wind nach dem Südwesten und ließ ihn so stark...
In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "New York 2140" the flooded New York has all the big city charm and dazzle and fascination it ever had: "From here, the flooded Lower Manhatten lies at their feet like a Super-Venice, awe-inspiring, water-glistening, grand. Their city."...
