R.I.P. polar bear

Call me nuts if you like, but I’ve been convinced a tsunami is going to hit Cape Town. I’ve told those close to me, amid raised eyebrows, but it has always been a certain future event in my mind. Of course being one of that elite set called the mentally disordered, I’m not taken seriously on this. I’ve even recommended to people to sell their houses in the flat area and move out to higher ground. I have been told authoratatively that there are no known fault planes anywhere near Cape Town, and therefore this would be impossible.

A friend living in Edgemead had an interesting experience last weekend – she arrived home to find that several tiles had broken in her bathroom. Not just broken, but bent in half and snapped all in a line. That was on the Friday. Saturday night she invites me over to watch a dvd on her new player and we’re happily engrossed when there is a loud crack. Three more tiles, this time in the kitchen!

On my knees and chipping away grouting for two hours using a screwdriver and a small hammer gave me time to think this out. The line through the bathroom and straight across the kitchen could well just be a leaking water pipe expanding in the cold. It could also be that the back of the house is falling off. Whatever! A thought crossed my mind that it could also (really far fetched as it may sound) be due to the rising sea level running along a fault.

Well, just imagine my surprise when someone wandered into my office and said “do you know about the Milnerton fault?” as if this was something often spoken about? A quick googl found this article on News24: Quake Could Flatten Parts of CT. Way out! Another page found this.

How interesting! The old timers in Cape Town have often told me that way back in time Cape Town’s Castle was build with its walls in the sea. My colleague at work tells me her mother lives on Strand Street, so named because it ran along the beach. It’s now over a kilometer from the sea, with many high rise buildings along its sides. I think back to the events of the Tsunami a couple of years back, and how the satellite pictures showed a large island surrounded by marinas in the before pictures, and a small island surrounded by water afterwards. All the man-made landfill had been completely washed away!

The Ceres earthquake, as recent as 1969, 40 years being nothing in geophysical terms, measured 6.3 on the Richter Scale.  An earthquake measuring 3.1 reportedly hit Tableview. in 2003. The following excerpt comes from the Eskom Draft Scoping Report, one of the plan documents for the Koeberg nuclear plant:

(d) Geology and Seismology
The geological and seismological information was taken from CGS (2007a). The existing Nuclear Plant located at Koeberg is situated on Neoproterozoic rocks of the Malmesbury Group, intruded by the late Neoproterozoic Cape Granite Suite and Cretaceous dolerite dykes (Figure 33 and Figure 34). Most of the coastal plain around the site is covered with Cenozoic sand. Exposures of Pliocene-Pleistocene marine deposits and their overlying aeolianites are rare, being often restricted to low beach cliffs, such as at Springfontyn.
The basement rocks are cut by intense Pan-African brittle-ductile shear zones and, in places, by regional NW striking brittle shear zones. The Cape Peninsula outlier contains structural characteristics of both the western branch and the syntaxis of the Cape Fold Belt. The closest known fault of the latter type is the Mamre fault (De Beer, 2005), whilst another such possible shear zone, tentatively called the proposed Milnerton fault, has been proposed (Dames and Moore, 1976) to occur between Bloubergstrand and Cape Town.

Either way, if the water rises, as the crisis climate people say it will, or if there is an earthquake, Table Mountain will become an island once again. This being so, don’t you think it would be good planning to move inland? In comment 98 on this page Nigel Williams discusses the concept of a 70m rise, (based on the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) over the next 90 years, and attempts to narrow it down to a possible 5m rise in the next 20 years. Al Gore takes a harsher stance by predicting an 8-10m rise in the next 10-15 years.

The interesting conclusion to Nigel’s piece is what will happen in terms of the fishing industry. The current spawning grounds will be flooded, and all current spawn consumed. Estimates of 200 years are given before new spawning grounds are created. Fish are not the only ones at risk. January 2008 saw the US government being faced with the decision to add polar bears on the endangered species list – why? The ice is melting…

In his book “The Revenge of Gaia”, James Lovelock predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.

Food for thought…