So, the first buttress of a buttress to float away was at the mouth of the Cook Glacier, which held back the Wilkes/Victoria basin in eastern Antarctica. That basin contained enough ice all by itself to raise sea level twelve feet, and although not all of it slid out right away, over the next two decades it went faster than expected, until more than half of it was adrift and quickly melting in the briny deep.
Greenland, by the way, a not-inconsiderable player in all this, was also melting faster and faster. Its ice cap was an anomaly, a remnant of the huge north polar ice cap of the last great ice age, located way farther south than could be explained by anything but its fossil status, and in effect overdue for melting by about ten thousand years, but lying in a big bathtub of mountain ranges which kept it somewhat stable and refrigerating itself. So, but its ice was melting on the surface and falling down cracks in the ice to the bottoms of its glaciers, thereby lubricating their descent down big chutelike canyons that cut through the coastal mountain-range-as-leaky-bathtub, and as a result it too was melting, at about the same time the Wilkes/Victoria basin was slumping into the Southern Ocean. That Greenland melt is why when you looked at average temperature maps of the Earth in those years, and even for decades before then, and the whole world was a bright angry red, you still saw one cool blue spot, southeast of Greenland. What could have caused the ocean there to cool, one wondered through those decades, how mysterious, one said, and then got back to burning carbon.
So: the First Pulse was mostly the Wilkes/Victoria basin, also Greenland, also West Antarctica, another less massive but consequential contributor, as its basins lay almost entirely below sea level, such that they were quick to break their buttresses and then float up on the subtruding ocean water and sail away. All this ice, breaking up and slumping into the sea. Years of greatest rise, 2052–2061, and suddenly the ocean was ten feet higher. Oh no! How could it be?
Rates of change themselves change, that’s how. Say the speed of melting doubles every ten years. How many decades before you are fucked? Not many. It resembles compound interest. Or recall the old story of the great Mughal emperor who was talked into repaying a peasant who had saved his life by giving the peasant one rice grain and then two, and doubling that again on every square of a chessboard. Possibly the grand vizier or chief astronomer advised this payment, or the canny peasant, and the unquant emperor said sure, good deal, rice grains who cares, and started to dribble out the payment, having been well trained in counting rice grains by a certain passing Serbian dervish woman. A couple few rows into the chessboard he sees how he’s been had and has the vizier or astronomer or peasant beheaded. Maybe all three, that would be imperial style. The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.
So that’s how it happened with the First Pulse. Big surprise. What about the Second Pulse, you ask? Don’t ask. It was just more of the same, but doubled as everything loosened in the increasing warmth and the higher seas. Mainly the Aurora Basin’s buttress let loose and its ice flowed down the Totten Glacier. The Aurora was a basin even bigger than Wilkes/Victoria. And then, with sea level raised fifteen feet, then twenty feet, all the buttresses of the buttresses lost their footing all the way around the Antarctic continent, after which said buttresses were shoved from behind into the sea, after which gravity had its way with the ice in all the basins all around East Antarctica, and the ice resting on ground below sea level in West Antarctica, and all that ice quickly melted when it hit water, and even when it was still ice and floating, often in the form of tabular bergs the size of major nations, it was already displacing the ocean by as much as it would when it finished melting. Why that should be is left as an exercise for the reader to solve, after which you can run naked from your leaky bath crying Eureka!
It is worth adding that the Second Pulse was a lot worse than the First in its effects, because the total rise in sea level ended up at around fifty feet. This truly thrashed all the coastlines of the world, causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One eighth of the world’s population lived near coastlines and were more or less directly impacted, as was fishing and aquaculture, meaning one third of humanity’s food, plus a fair bit of coastal (meaning in effect rained-upon) agriculture, as well as the aforementioned shipping. And with shipping forestalled, thus impacting world trade, the basis for that humming neoliberal global success story that had done so much for so few was also thrashed. Never had so much been done to so many by so few!
All that happened very quickly, in the very last years of the twenty-first century. Apocalyptic, Armageddonesque, pick your adjective of choice. Anthropogenic could be one. Extinctional another. Anthropogenic mass extinction event, the term often used. End of an era. Geologically speaking it might rather be the end of an age, period, epoch, or eon, but that can’t be decided until it has run its full course, so the common phrase “end of an era” is acceptable for the next billion or so years, after which we can revise the name appropriately.
But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before. Cleaning up the mess a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!
It’s true that the newly drowned coastlines, at first abandoned, were quickly reoccupied by desperate scavengers and squatters and fisherpeople and so on, the water rats as they were called among many other humorous names. There were a lot of these people, and a lot of them were what you might call radicalized by their experiences. And although basic services like electricity, water, sewage, and police were at first gone, a lot of infrastructure was still there, amphibiously enduring in the new shallows, or getting repeatedly flushed and emptied in the zones between low and high tide. Immediately, as an integral part of the natural human response to tragedy and disaster, lawsuits proliferated. Many concerned the status of this drowned land, which it had to be admitted was now actually, and even perhaps technically, meaning legally, the shallows of the ocean, such that possibly the laws defining and regulating it were not the same as they had been when the areas in question were actual land. But since it was all wrecked anyway, the people in Denver didn’t really care. Nor the people in Beijing, who could look around at Hong Kong and London and Washington, D.C., and São Paolo and Tokyo and so on, all around the globe, and say, Oh, dear! What a bummer for you, good luck to you! We will help you all we can, especially here at home in China, but anywhere else also, and at a reduced rate of interest if you care to sign here.
And they may also have felt, along with everyone in that certain lucky one percent, that some social experimentation at the drowned margin might let off some steam from certain irate populaces, social steam that might even accidentally innovate something useful. So in the immortal words of Bertolt Brecht, they “dismissed the people and elected another one,” i.e. moved to Denver, and left the water rats to sort it out as best they could. An experiment in living wet. Wait and see what those crazy people did with it, and if it was good, buy it. As always, right? You brave bold hip and utterly co-opted avant-gardists, you know it already, whether you’re reading this in 2144 or 2312 or 3333 or 6666.