Circular Tides

The Big Tide Chronicles I

Who Killed Toby Ireland?

by Jerry Buckley

PROLOGUE

During a six-month period of time in 2024 the world changed. An aquatic blitzkrieg, slowly building over decades, unleashed itself. From the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, on average, sea level had risen a little over a tenth of an inch each year or about one foot per century. Throughout the 20th century, the increasing glacier melt in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland hastened that rise.

The melting ice sheets had not gone unnoticed, at least in the scientific community. As the respected publication “Scientific American” pointed out in its February 2019 issue “the enormous ice sheets of the planet hold more than 200 feet of sea level rise; a small change to them can create big changes to our coastal areas.”

In the late 1990s dramatic changes to the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland provided a hint of what was to come. Increased water temperatures dismantled the ice shelf in front of the glacier, causing Jakobshavn to advance more rapidly, while at the same time thinning. Through the 2000s this became one of the largest contributors to sea level rise. In 2002 the Larsen B Ice Shelf in the Antarctic disintegrated in five weeks. This event did not immediately raise the sea level, but it allowed the ice sheet on land behind it to flow faster to the ocean.

The tipping point was reached in the summer of 2024 when the ice shelf protecting the immense Thwaites Glacier Basin in Antarctica melted. The resulting rapid rise in sea level affected the entire planet with islands and coastal areas hit hardest. This became known as the Transantarctic Thwaites Stochastic Event. In the Florida Keys, it was known simply as THE BIG TIDE.