Among the stranger ideas in the speculations on Putin’s actual aims in Ukraine is the idea of controlling the heartland of the World Island, an idea first put forward by H. J. Mackinder in 1904. This idea was taken up by the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin in his book Foundations of Geopolitics, which allegedly has inspired geopolitical thinking in Russia since it was published in 1997.
Looking at this map of what is now the basis of geopolitics, the continents appear as obvious and necessary aspects of our world. And surely, their main outlines will not change for the foreseeable future. However, nothing stays forever:
In this ever-changing global landscape, lands come and go and ultimately are submerged into the core of the earth, to be melted away and resurface through volcanoes or more tectonic shifts. On a long enough time scale everything will be destroyed and reborn. The amnesia of geology.
But of course, even on a shorter timescale the landscape changes, and sometimes quite dramatically. Volcanic activity gives rise to new islands, like the birth of Surtsey outside Iceland’s south coast in November 1963. Predictions are that it will erode in 100 years, just slightly slower in geological terms than its sibling Jólnir, born in August 1966 and disappeared again in a couple of months.
But even stranger islands exist, that tell us of landscapes that are lost. Today only islands and islets, as remnants of these lost lands.
Other islands disappear in either natural or artificial explosions. Elugelab, a small part of an atoll in the Marshall Islands disappeared in a nuclear test in 1952, mimicking weakly the destruction brought by natural forces on other islands.
So islands are born from the sea, either by instant volcanic eruptions, by erosion, or by sea levels either receding or rising. Zealandia is a submerged continent which has alternated between being submerged and above sea level during different periods of glaciation. Today only New Zealand is visible above the surface.
But the whole of the British Isles as well as Scandinavia and the northern coasts of continental Europe are the remnants but on a much larger scale of a landscape that has disappeared much more recently. Doggerland, it is theorized, was both gradually lost to the rising sea levels, and then was lost in a great tsunami from the North, destroying the last of this true heartland of what we now call Europe.
These spectacular and alluring remnants of lands lost to the sea should remind us of the future ruins of the landscapes we now inhabit. In the end, everything is an island. All the land inhabited by humans are either islands in the strict sense or just temporary parts of the great Eurasian World Island, or the other continents for the moment spread around the globe.
Everything will be lost beneath the waves, beneath the tectonic plates, in the subduction zones or the inevitable rise of the ocean.
In my city, planners are already preparing for future Swedish sea level rise on the order of 1-3,8 meters during the next 100 years. Since a whole new city is currently being built on the river banks, there are plans to build flood gates for an estimated 1 billion euros.
New islands will appear as the sea rises, and we must remember that we live on both old seabed as well as future seabed. This should make us wary of taking our life afloat for granted. The natural state of the earth is submersion.
Thanks for reading,
Tormod