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June 2nd, 2014 - The biblical flood and the episode of Noah’s Ark have their counterparts in almost all mythologies: Babylon, Ancient Greece, India, Iceland and many other countries. Old folklores have invariably terrifying stories of destruction due to fire, rising waters, earthquakes and other combinations of the forces of nature.

The island of Viti Levu, in the Fiji islands has all the appearance of the culmination of a collapsed continent.

The belief that a whole continent has disappeared in the South Pacific is still alive. The legend of the people of Mu, as this continent was called, are supposed to have been the common ancestors of the Egyptians and Mayans.

Around the world, nearly 2000 years, the legend of the engulfed continent of Atlantis is still alive, after its history (or its legend) was told by Socrates and related by Plato. Every century, some historians claim for having located the ruins of this antique continent submerged by the flood.

Bora Bora, Tahiti, the Marquesas and other islands are extinct volcanoes with jagged terrain that give the impression of being the mountains peaks of some engulfed continent.

It is hard to believe that at one time (between 8000 and 6000 BC) the Sahara was teeming with human and animal life as evidenced by the frescoes found in the Tassili cave. This is from 2000 BC that the Sahara began to dry up to become the desert we know now.

In the Andes, excavations and evidences around the Lake of Titicaca and the Tiahuanaco port show a sudden geological cataclysm that threw this once maritime region and created a mountain lake and region in altitude (4000 m).

Today we attach more interest than in the past to the legends relating to engulfed continents and the many stories of global cataclysms hold our attention because we are facing more and more the challenge engendered by human activities which are destroying the earth, driven by the human thirst for huge profit and their endless race for progress.

Some compelling evidences :

– Since 3000 years before today, and until the early nineteenth century, the sea level was virtually unchanged : there was only an increase of 0.1 to 0.2 mm per year.

– From 1900 to 1992, the sea level increased by 1 to 3 mm per year (TOPEX / Poseidon report).

– As a total, during the twentieth century, the sea rose 17 cm.

– In 20 years, from 1990 to 2011, the sea rose an average of 3.2 mm per year : it is 60% more than the forecast of 2 mm per year announced by he average scenario of the IPCC.

For a hundred years now, the economic activity which is accelerating around the globe also accelerates the process of rising sea and water : there, there are flooded areas, and further, there are beaches which are disapearing and a little further again, there are countries where the climate is changing...

In 2007 it was estimated that the sea could rise 18 to 42 cm by 2100 (IPCC report). In November 2012, it has been admitted that by 2100, the rising waters would rather be between 0.5 and 1 m (18th conference on climate change in Doha).

The consequences are there are entire areas which are facing the water menace : in Papua New Guinea, Solomon islands, Torres Strait islands, Micronesia, Fiji, Marshall islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Maldives, Zanzibar, Sunderbans, Bangladesh, Artic... It is a reality now : everywhere the sea level is rising. This is one of the consequences of the global warming through two main processes: the expansion of the water, of the sea (because the oceans are warming) and the melting of the land ice.

As the Black Death which had destroyed between the 1350 and 1370 period, twenty-five million people in Europe, global warming looks as the great plague of the end of our 21st century.

And what are doing the governments around the world: nothing or little, they are expecting ... the deluge! Because, it is true that politicals earn more in managing crises and disasters than preventing them. Sure, it’s more rewarding!

2100 ... or when the legends of lost worlds will become reality.