Sea Level: A History

By Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

University of Chicago Press 2024

“Human influence on sea level is a fairly recent phenomenon,” writes science historian Wilko Graf von Hardenberg in his slim, extensively-researched new book Sea Level: A History. “But the means we use to assess the effects of anthropogenic climate change are, like those we use to determine elevation, rooted in history – in cultural, social, and scientific agendas that were radically different from the current ones.” 

These are the three concentrations of von Hardenberg’s book: the history of how sea level was first conceived and established, the way it’s been spread and established as the bedrock, so to speak, geodetic measurement, and of course its uncertain future in the face of tides rising as result of climate change. 

The book’s historical thread naturally opens it up to the kind of anti-factual nonsense that infects even scientific writing in the popular market, but our author mostly avoids it. “Mean sea level – like other height reference points – does not exist independently of cultural techniques for the appreciation of verticality, and its changes do not exist independently of the methods used to assess rates of change over time,” he writes at one point, for instance, but almost before the reader can start wincing from that “appreciation of verticality,” the line is almost entirely rescued: “But once created within a specific social and cultural setting as a tool to make the world more legible, sea level becomes quintessential in shaping the environment as we know it.

In the various historical iterations of what sea level is, as von Hardenberg rightly observes, “politics often proved more important than the accuracy of measurement.” And only shortly after those political complications began to sweep out of the purely scientific aspect of the concept, von Hardenberg’s most pertinent concern sweeps in: climate-driven rises in sea level around the world. His End Notes for the book (fairly heavy ballast, since the book itself is just a bit north of 100 pages) are a wealth of follow-ups on contemporary data about the crisis unfolding. 

Case-in-point, the city of Miami, naturally rated as one of the most vulnerable major coastal cities in the world with its vast skylines sitting directly on the water like it was a tabletop. As Hardenberg notes, Miami is sinking, with no comprehensive plan in place. “The interventions are small, piecemeal, not coordinated with broader, citywide processes or even with the steps taken by one’s neighbors,” he writes. “The rich move inland and upward, acting as individuals, unconcerned with the preservation of a functional urban infrastructure, while around them other communities, more dependent on a working social system, face pressure from developers seeking to remove them from the high ground to which they were forced during the city’s earlier waterfront boom, or find their own homes and savings threatened due to sea-level rise.”

Sea Level is a delightfully compacted study, refreshingly free of the kind of doomsaying that usually accompanies this subject. And the sotto voce warning about hobbling science with the politics of the moment is unfortunately pointed. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News