Can Seawalls Save Us? Huge coastal barriers could protect the world’s cities. But they’ll have unexpected costs.
Can Seawalls Save Us? Huge coastal barriers could protect the world’s cities. But they’ll have unexpected costs.
Huge coastal barriers could protect the world’s cities. But they’ll have unexpected costs.
The oldest known seawall was built around 5000 B.C., after a period of warming that melted glaciers and lifted the Mediterranean by a staggering twenty-six feet. A Stone Age community, living near a beach in present-day Israel, tried to ward off the sea with a wall of three-foot-tall boulders about the length of a football field. But, in the millennia that followed, the Mediterranean rose even more. Archeologists ultimately discovered the stones on the seafloor, under ten feet of water. The site, they wrote, was “ominously relevant” to our time.
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It’s cool. No need to consider our impact on the planet that sustains us. Just keep propping up shitty legacy systems.