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We’re seeking plausible stories, novels, films, and any other media that relate closely to the following problem:
The warming oceans reach a tipping point. Other than the lurid film “Day After Tomorrow,” are there more realistic and well-researched SF novels or stories about the shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor Current? Or the release of undersea methane ices?
The Godwhale, 1974, T.J. Bass …may cover some aspects of this problem. The story arc involves the oceans dying and some centuries later filling with life again. The titular Godwhale is an abandoned ocean harvester.
Other interesting elements:
suspended animation
body modification/cybernetics/cloning (sub-theme: cloning ethics)
Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm has benthic marine organisms seeded by a mastermind (a fictional collective of deep-sea organisms grown sapient) to weaken clathrate deposits, triggering tsunamis and destroying much of the Atlantic and North Sea coastal area.
J.G. Ballard The Drowned World – oceans have risen due to sun getting warmer (the book predates awareness of CO2-driven warming). The story does not describe solutions, only the “devolution” of mankind to primeval conditions – though presented as a not-horrific dreamlike transition – lotus-eater mode.
Of course, Kim Stanley Robinson has offered Fifty Degrees Below Zero – deep freeze hits Washington DC. That is the “original” story of the concept I think.
The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham features an invasion by beings who prefer the ocean depths, and who cause the melting of the ice caps to raise sea levels. It also predicts general skepticism and denial of the issue.
Forty Signs of Rain and Sixty Days and Counting are other Kim Stanley Robinson books in the same series as Fifty Degree Below Zero and offer potentially near-future global warming scenarios for the east coast of the US. His book New York 2140 covers a future New York that is underwater due to global sea level rise.
In Greg Benford’s 1980 Timescape, a scientist in the year 1998 desperately tries to use tachyons to travel back in time to contact a laboratory in 1962. He is trying to advise them of the rapid rise in global warming having maxed out the oceans’ capacity to absorb heat, leading to an irrevocable tipping point and extinction-level disaster. The consequences include progressively larger algal blooms, poisoned crops, and a disrupted water cycle, among other things. The tachyon messages work, but not everyone wins.
Hal Clement posited an earth where food supplies were so constrained that it was deemed appropriate to build an orbital habitat where a genetically engineered biological lifeform as a thin membrane contained a mass of water and in which earth fishes and so forth, genetically engineered where necessary to survive in zero G.