Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
accumulation of nitrous oxide from denitrification of farm fertilizers and car use
throughout Europe, had created an increasingly desperate situation. The upland
forests had dwindled to scrub; the charismatic mammals of the National Park had
moved northwards and been shot by farmers, for with a greater rise in temperature
than had been realized on average in Europe, evaporation rates had soared and
their surface water sources had all but disappeared. The river only reached the
sea in 1 year out of 5. The olive groves and vineyards had been abandoned.
Crops failed in most years and the farmers moved away leaving a low maquis
scrub to reclaim the land. There were even some patches of desert with mostly
bare rock and a seasonal cover of annual weeds. What little water there was now
commanded a high price and was affordable only by the market gardeners and
the coastal towns. Many ponds, rendered dry one summer, never recovered in
the following winter and the unique fish and amphibian fauna had suffered loss
of at least half of its former species. Moreover, in the upland scrubs and remaining
poor forest, fires raged most years, accelerating the change to semi-desert and
encroaching further towards the rich coastal resorts with every year. With
denudation of the land, the winter rain, falling now in a few torrential storms,
washed the soil away, making any future recovery very difficult, and clogged the
river with mud banks littered with the debris of human industry and abandonment.
There were frequent landslides, and deep gulleys were appearing in the hillsides.
The abandoned villages had an even deeper sadness about them. The lesson that
water is the most precious of commodities for human societies had been forgotten
but was now being painfully taught yet again. The church bells no more tolled
over a warm and picturesque land.
In the coastal lowlands, activity was maintained by using desalinated sea water,
but that had the side effect of creating hypersaline lagoons where the huge
quantities of evaporated salt were discarded. They were sometimes colourful
with the bright orange of tolerant algae, but they somehow jarred in the landscape
and birds rarely could use them, let alone any other animals beyond the
microscopic protozoa. Where freshwater, or rather, now mildly saline lagoons
still persisted, there had been encroachment at the edges by aggressive reedy
plants like Typha, Impatiens and Arundo , and sometimes near-monospecific tracts
completely covered the former open water, pushing out the submerged species
and the invertebrates and fish that depended on them. Alien crayfish had escaped
from fish farms and were now also wreaking havoc on the remaining plants.
By the end of the 21st century, with temperatures locally up by 4-5°C and
rainfall very sporadic, there was the complete collapse of the local society and
economy that had affected much of the tropics and subtropics some decades earlier.
The landscape was mostly semi-desert; the river flowed only for a few days following
a storm; the coastal resorts had failed for they were too hot now for comfort and
the former cheap air transport that had sustained them was no more as fuel costs
had risen. Refugees from North Africa and beyond eked out a hand-to-mouth
existence in camps around the crumbling concrete of the apartment blocks and
hotels. The market gardens had been converted to small plots by individual refugee
families who managed to grow just about enough cassava to survive and could take
a few fish from the sea. There was little organized infrastructure. The Mediterranean
coast had been reduced to the status of 20th-century Saharan Africa.
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