The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely: both Mumbai and Goa face the Arabian Sea, which, unlike the Bay of Bengal, has not historically generated a great deal of cyclonic activity. Nor, unlike India’s east coast, has the west coast had to deal with tsunamis: it was unaffected by the tsunami of 2004, for instance, which devastated large stretches of the eastern seaboard. Still, the question intrigued me and I began to hunt for more information on the region’s seismic and cyclonic profiles. Soon enough I learned that the west coast’s good fortune might be merely a function of the providential protraction of geological time—for the Arabian Sea is by no means seismically inactive. A previously unknown, and probably very active, fault system was discovered in the Arabian Sea a few years ago, off the coast of Oman; the system is 800 kilometres long and faces the west coast of India. This discovery was announced in an article that concludes with these words, chilling in their understatement: ‘These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean.’ Soon, I also had to rethink my assumptions about cyclones and the Arabian Sea. Reading about Hurricane Sandy, I came upon more and more evidence that climate change may indeed alter patterns of cyclonic activity around the world: Adam Sobel’...