SmackDown #ooorah!

My day at the beach

Walking around the island before breakfast took less time than cooking an egg. Not that there were any eggs left in the first place. And if I'd had an egg, I'd rather spent my time cooking it than walking around the island. As I had no eggs and nothing else suitable for breakfast available, walking seemed the only slightly reasonable alternative. After all, on good days, the ocean carries something edible my way. Today was not a lucky one. There were no fish, no dead birds, not even seaweeds to collect.

As it was a sunny day I decided to spend it hungry at the beach. The beach is a stretch of sand where an orchard used to grow not so long ago. The waves eroded away the topsoil and left me with the illusion of my private little sandy paradise. Of course there are no palm trees, not even apple trees anymore, no coconuts, no ice cream, no alcoholic drinks and, sadly, no eggs. Okay, I admit I keep dreaming of a plate heaped with steaming eggs and bacon. I know it's not going to happen, with the apocalypse, global warming and everything. But a man can dream, can't he? There's not much else to do, anyway. Except maybe to recalculate one more time the exact moment the level of the ocean will finally stop rising.

I sit down on the beach and dig the yellowed newspaper out of my backpack. The faded print is hardly readable any more, so many times the paper was folded, read, cried over, and crushed by frustrated hands.
I pick up a stick and start to write the main parameters into a stretch of smooth sand: estimated volume of ice in Antarctica and the northern polar ice cap. Estimated volume of ice in the Greenland ice shield and major glaciers of the Alps. There must have been heaps of glaciers in other countries as well, I think. In the Andes? The Himalayas certainly, but have there been others? Canada, the Rocky Mountains possibly, and what about New Zealand? Why doesn't the newspaper mention them? Did they even bother to give remotely accurate numbers?

I based my strategy on this news clip. While most people fled in panic to major mountain ranges as soon as the water started to rise, I chose a perfect island-to-be, a place I'd claim as my own after the apocalypse.
Up until now, my venture was successful, even if I ran out of eggs and some other helpful items. But the place gets smaller by the day. Calculating, I look up from the endless ocean to the summit of the dominant hill of my island. It's not higher than a three storey house, twelve to fifteen metres at most. Then I decide to check the mark set to the left of the beach.

Sometimes it is hard to guess, but today, with the surface as calm as a teacup, it's evident: The sea level has risen, again.