San Francisco is on a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. Global warming will cause the sea level to rise at least four feet by the year 2100. Places in San Francisco that are now dry land will be under the ocean and the bay. Detailed maps exist of all the areas that will be lost to the water. They are specific, down to the streets and city blocks affected. Using the maps we can go to the parts of San Francisco that are going to disappear by the end of the century. The photographs here document those places.
A Tour of the San Andreas Fault
The San Andreas system of earthquake faults runs through California north to south for about eight hundred miles. The Hayward fault on the heavily populated east side of San Francisco Bay is part of the system. The San Andreas is a California icon, but few can say where it is exactly. Using maps from the California Geological Survey we can find those places and observe what people do there. In an earthquake the fault ruptures and each side travels up to ten feet in opposite directions, making it the opposite of real estate and more like a black hole. The fifty-six photographs in the gallery above follow two main rules-a fault zone is always somewhere in the frame, and there must be evidence of human activity.
Central Illinois
In the last ice age a glacier two miles high covered what is now called Illinois. When it melted it left the land completely flat and full of nutrients. This was soon covered by an ocean of tall prairie grasses. Native Americans left it largely untouched for ten thousand years. European arrivals started the first permanent farms. Today, agriculture is practiced on an industrial scale, and the landscape has been transformed into vast corn and soybean monocultures. But everywhere, nature is working hard to take it back.
