What if the sea turned to glass?
One morning the sea turns to solid glass. The waves stop and boats are stuck where they were. You can walk to the island.
The harbour has stopped moving. He walks out to his boat.
That morning
A harbour that should be moving is a flat, hard, green plain. Boats lean at odd angles, half stuck in the surface. A fisherman steps out carefully and walks to his boat. The surface holds.
Radios fill with messages from ships that can neither sail nor sink. The ones far out at sea are silent.
The first winter
Ports are now the edge of what feels like a new continent. Goods that came by ship now come by lorry, until the roads run out. People pour gravel ramps onto the glass and drive a short way out, very slowly.
Rain collects in puddles on the surface and doesn’t drain away. Coastal towns struggle with water in new ways.
Five years on
Children walk to school across what their parents still call the bay. The glass has gone dull with dust and boot marks. Where it has cracked, the smell of the old sea leaks out.
Fishing villages are just villages now. Old boats have become sheds, roofs and a museum that used to be the fleet.
Who wins
- Anyone who wanted to walk to the islandThe ferry route is now a footpath.
- Towns afraid of floodingThe sea can’t rise if it can’t move.
Who loses
- PortsA harbour with no water is a car park.
- FishermenThe fish are still there, sealed under their feet.
- Ships at sea that morningThey stay exactly where the glass caught them.
A frozen sea is possible. A glass sea isn’t, and if it were, it would stop ocean currents carrying heat around the planet. Walking to the island would be a nice afternoon. The weather afterwards would not.
Would you live here?
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