Stephen Baxter - Flood

“Yep,” said Thandie. “Every little helps.”

And of course, Gary thought, ahead of each of these clinically mapped incursions a desperate crowd of refugees would be driven headlong, and behind it cities and towns would be left drowned and littered with corpses. Such things no longer needed saying.

Thandie said that after spending some time with Lily in Peru they had traveled together to the US, where they had tried to push on the search for Grace. But the federal government was in the middle of a major relocation from flooded-out DC to Denver, Colorado, the highest state capital. And there Thandie had formed an impression of what was becoming of North America.

Florida and Louisiana were all but gone now, nothing left but salvage crews working over the flooded ruins of the cities. The great plains of the eastern half of the continent were rapidly being inundated, and throughout the eastern states immense bands of refugees washed west. A major community was coalescing in the Appalachians, the highest point between the east coast and the Rockies and still above the floodwaters. America’s single greatest problem was a savage drought, which was affecting much of the agricultural heartland. Meanwhile both coasts were battered by a plague of hurricanes, more of them and more intense every year, giant storms feeding off ocean heat that raged over the ruins of the abandoned coastal cities.

But there was also a gathering refugee crisis in Canada, as Hudson Bay spread inexorably wider, and the sea forced its way down the throat of the Saint Lawrence valley toward the Great Lakes, drowning Quebec and Montreal and Toronto. Elena said there was another extinction event going on there. The Lakes were the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth; now their ecologies were poisoned by salt.

When it was Elena’s turn, she began, “I myself have seen much of Europe in my travels…”

The plight of northern Europe was in fact the big story of the year. The inundation of Holland had been the beginning of a drastic flooding episode that now extended across the north European plain, through north Germany and into Poland. An immense population was in flight, heading either north to Scandinavia or south toward the Latin countries, a program of evacuation still more or less controlled by the European Union, though national rivalries were reemerging. But the south had problems of its own, with an intense drought locked down from Spain to the Levant. Meanwhile isostatic shifts were sparking off earthquakes and volcanism across the Mediterranean region. In the Middle East a major war was brewing between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the proximate cause being audacious attempts by Syria and others to get their hands on the Israelis’ advanced desalination technology.

They spoke in broad-brush terms of other areas none of them had witnessed in person recently, relaying secondhand accounts. Gary repeated Sanjay’s description of Australia.

In the Indian subcontinent, the misery of flooding and war in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had been augmented by years of monsoons that failed or mistimed because of shifts in the global ocean circulation system. In southeast Asia there was great suffering. In Vietnam there had been a tremendous evacuation from a drowning Ho Chi Minh City to the highlands of the north. Cambodia and Thailand were mostly gone. North and South Korea had abandoned their fratricidal struggle and opened their common border, the better to manage the flows of refugees caused by the rising of the Yellow Sea. In China, that same rise had caused the abandonment of Beijing, and a huge wash of refugees into Inner Mongolia and beyond.

Much of Africa was gripped by drought, while the Rift Valley was flooding. The rainforests of the Congo were dying back too, and Gary had heard of heroic efforts to save the last colonies of African great apes.

“And in Russia,” Elena said,“all across the roof of the planet, the taiga is burning, the world forest.”

“Great,” said Thandie. “More cee-oh-two.”

Elena said, “A number of us are as concerned about the warming as about the flooding.”

Thandie managed to laugh. “I love your Russian understatement. Yes, quite a number of us are concerned about that. More sources of cee-oh-two, less available sinks as the land drowns with its forests and marshes. Even in the sea we’re not getting any breaks. Higher temperatures reduce the productivity of the phytoplankton, so they can’t draw down as much of the cee-oh-two as they used to. Oh, and as the sea spreads at the expense of land and ice, the planet’s albedo is reduced.” The flooded world was getting darker. So it reflected less light, absorbed more of the sun’s heat energy, and got even hotter.

“And so it goes,” Gary said. “A whole interlocking set of feedback cycles, all of them set to ‘positive.’”

“Yeah,” Thandie said. “In fact I think we’ve reached a crucial point where the climate changes driven by the sea rise itself are starting to kick in major league.”

“So what next? You think your sea-level rise is going to keep on coming?”

“In the longer term,” Thandie murmured. “But short term we’re going to see a pulse, an artifact of ice cap melting…”

The sea rise and the accompanied warming had together been enough to destabilize both the Greenland and Antarctic caps. The West Antarctic ice sheet, floating on the ocean, was beginning to shatter as the water steadily rose and warmed. But the seaborne sheet acted as a dam which blocked the glaciers, rivers of ice running off the frozen continent. Now those glaciers rushed to the sea, calving into icebergs. It would not be long before the huge East Antarctic sheet, anchored firmly to its base of rock for twenty million years, would also begin to crumble.

“So,” said Elena. “Floods. Earthquakes. Vast refugee flows, which in turn bring resource shortages, the spread of disease and conflicts. Shifting climatic zones which, among other things, change the ranges of mosquitoes and other infection vectors. Our planet is failing us, and our civilization is under immense strain.”

“Nicely summarized,” Thandie said dryly.“You fucking Russians are a miserable bunch.”

“We have a saying,” Elena said. “The first five hundred years are the worst. I fear I am getting cold. We should go and unpack for the night. And then we can share this desolate news all over again.” She clambered out of the water, her underwear sticking to her flesh.

Thandie watched Elena, and she saw Gary watching her. Thandie stood up, stretching, and walked over to Gary. She really was quite beautiful, he thought, in an athletic, hunter-gatherer kind of way. She murmured, “You keep your observations to yourself.” But she grinned at him, not malicious. She walked on, showering him with droplets warmed by her body.

As they dressed, Elena said she had negotiated with the dacha staff for an evening meal. “There will be local delicacies, beetroot soup, and trout served in walnut sauce. Do not be concerned about the fish. Only the deeper parts of the Black Sea are poisoned by industrial hydrogen sulphide…”

The party crossed the Caucasus, heading north and east, skirting the foothills of the southern mountains. Then they descended toward the shore of the Caspian Sea, traveling over a steppe of sandy clay until they reached the lower valley of the Volga.

They lodged for a day at Astrakhan. Close to the border with Kazakhstan, this was a coastal town that sprawled across the delta of the Volga, spanning eleven islands. The Caspian Sea, cut off from the global ocean, had not yet risen, and the lands around its shore had not yet suffered the flooding experienced elsewhere. It was strange for Gary and the others to run around town and to see the cathedral, the city’s kremlin, the bridges, all eerily intact, as if nothing in the world had changed. But the city was all but drained of its people, and they saw more soldiers than civilians. The Russian authorities knew the oceanic transgression was coming, and had taken what precautions they could.