The Lost Continent of Miami

  Atlantis (the Bahamas)

Nothing is really wrong in Florida. Life goes on as usual, but if you read Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent New Yorker article it sounds a little like Miamians, at least, may one day awaken to find themselves in danger of becoming The Lost Continent of Atlantis or even worse Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (“The Siege of Miami,” The New Yorker, 12/21/15). Were the developers of one of the big Bahamanian resorts being unwitting Cassandras when they named their property, Atlantis? The usual rejoinder to jeremiads about global warming and rising water levels due to melting ice on the poles is that Venice and Amsterdam have been below sea level for years, but Kolbert takes that into consideration too, as she deals with the particular structure of what lies under Miami’s seemingly or not so seemingly livable conditions (in the article she describes traveling to certain areas of Miami which suffer from chronic flooding). But let’s imagine what Miami would be like under water. People places like South Beach go to trendy oxygen bars so it wouldn’t be a very big stretch to have them swimming around with aqualungs, which themselves have to be regularly tested for TB. The notion of selling air is in fact no longer quaint as we’ve seen from the reports about the smog in Peking which has people purchasing canisters of fresh air off the same racks that they buy their bottled water. Life goes on and people will frequent the Mandarin Oriental or The Fontainebleau, even if they're six feet under. You’ll have water locks which let you into your room and when you go to a bar called the Mermaid, a comely woman bartender wearing a mask will take her snorkel out of her mouth to ask what you're going to have. Miami will be like a big water park. You’ll visit it the way you do the Coney Island aquarium, only instead of fish floating in the tank, you’ll find people.

Atlantis

Now that all the specialists have weighed in.  Now that all the jeremiads about global warming are proving true and there's definite proof that the polar icecaps are melting and that the process is irreversible, perhaps we will at last find Atlantis. Maybe that's the silver lining to the otherwise bleak picture and maybe our approach has to be that instead of trying to shore up our drowning civilization, we will simply let it sink and then cover it in a glass dome. If the suggestion seems far flung, look at geodesic domes in which biodiversity is able to thrive. In a controlled environment, plants and other forms of life produce the oxygen necessary to sustain life. The only difference will be that mankind will now peer into watery heavens, with the old atmosphere a lethal purgatory that’s only a holding spot for those traveling out of the earth’s orbit, like flyers on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, provided the carrier is able to iron out the wrinkles in the wake of the crash of a recent test flight). Atlantis is on the verge of changing from mythology into prophecy. Sure we can try to fight off fate with water locks or wetlands that create a buffer zone protecting particularly vulnerable coastal areas like the Broad Channel area of Queens which suffered mightily during Hurricane Sandy. But one day nothing will work and we will be on our way to becoming an underwater civilization.