This impressive photo of the Vietnamese metropolis in the Mekong Delta was taken by Lizzie Yarina, a researcher from the MIT Urban Crisis Lab and it accompanies her insightful article "You're sea wall won't save you".
Ho Chi Minh City
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Fear of Drowning – Aquaman and the Fate of Atlantis
Last year author Ram V and artist Christian Ward published a new three piece comic book on the DC-superhero Aquaman. (I have commented on the Aquaman movie from the same year here and here.) The story is not really about Atlantis, acording to the DC universe the...
Atlantis in “20.000 Leagues under the Seas”
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...
The gradual flood
The movie "Moonfall" from 2022 might be the worst movie ever done by Roland Emmerich, the movie director a Canadian journal aptly described as a "disaster-porn artist". Emmerich has filmed - or rather digitally created - a whole collection of gigantic flood waves over...
A very big shark and an underwater habitat for the rich
The action movie Meg was released in 2018 and did surprisingly well at the box offices, considering that the shark-vs-man plot seems so outdated and overdone. Apparently it was two decades in the making and it feels a bit like it too watching it. Nevertheless, there...
Leaving Planet Terror
The movie by Robert Rodriguez from 2007 is definitely not a climate narrative. Rather "Planet Terror", a true retro flick, picks up a theme popular in the 1970s: anihilation through some mysterious chemical experiment gone havoc. Still I found the closing images...
The Fall of Numenor
This is the cover of the 2022 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's stories about the sunken island kingdom Numenor, with an illustration by Alan Lee. In Tolkien's oeuvre Numenor is geographically situated west of Middle-Earth and shows strong similarities to Plato's Atlantis....
Retreat to the Metaverse?
The other night a friend told me about the island state Tuvalu creating a second version of itself online. The story had escaped me and when I heard it from him, it sounded reasonable enough. Having read about managed retreat and communities seeking drastic measures...
Values for survival: Vanishing homelands Bangladesh and Venice
I first became aware of the presence of climate refugees from Bangladesh in Venice, Italy, through a remark, Amitav Ghosh made in his book "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" from 2016. There the Indian-US-American novelist notes that Bengali...
Rich men’s flood myths: Batem and Yann’s comic “Fordlandia”
In a comic book from the Belgian comic series Marsupilami the artists Batem and Yann create a satire on megalomania pipe dreams of the super rich and the fascination of the flood myth. Set in the South-American Amazon basin, the plot is based on the true stoy of Henry...