Ever since Hurricane Sandy swamped the Jersey Shore and sloshed into New York City subways in 2012, Americans have grappled with the looming peril of rising seas.
But the Earth’s oceans have been expanding — that is, rising — for at least 20,000 years and most likely for much longer.
Much of the area covered by today’s Red Sea was dry land when the first hominid migrations from Africa into southwest Asia began about 600,000 years ago. About 15,000 years ago, if current theory is correct, the first peoples in the Americas had walked from Siberia into Alaska across a land bridge between Asia and North America. Today that land bridge is the sea bed of the oceanic waterway we call the Bering Strait.
By 6,000 years ago the British Isles had fully separated from continental Europe as rising waters flooded the connecting grass — and marsh — lands to form the English Channel. This oceanic rise also expanded the North and Baltic seas.
Even as rising seas flooded some lands, other land areas became drier, forming the Earth’s deserts. By 4,000 years ago, the grasslands and waterways of North Africa had dried into the great desert we call Sahara. Expanding oceans drew water from land-mass air, triggering the Great Drying from the Sahara, the Gobi Desert of northeastern Asia and the great deserts of the western Americas.
Overarching all this topographical change of diminished livable land area is the yellow dwarf star we call el Sol, or the sun. As the sun evolves into a much larger and hotter red giant, Earth will also continue to warm thus further expanding its oceanic and desert areas. And there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Sincerely yours,
Paul M. Craig
Northampton