Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”

In 1920, New Orleans boasted six pumping stations, including the Melpomene. These allowed “the old swamps” to be drained and converted into new communities, like Lakeview and Gentilly. Today there are twenty-four stations, which together operate one hundred and twenty pumps. During a storm, rain is funneled into a Venice’s-worth of canals. Then it’

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As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors

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