Logically it should have been an incredibly overpopulated destination as billions of people sought higher ground while the oceans rose around them.
I guess at a certain point the surviving remnants of humanity just said “screw it, I’m tired of moving” and just let the rising waters wash over them?
The world is fecking huge from the deck of a sailing ship. Heck, even from the deck of a supertanker. People get lost at sea all the time, even now, with all of the available tracking technology. If your starting place was supposed to be on the other side of the equator, you could easily spend your life missing the few bits of land still above the waves. Unless you were a Polynesian traveller, then you would be able to find land just by watching the wave patterns.
Maybe the lore spoken by the survivors in Waterworld as to why the sea levels rose isn’t exactly accurate. What if Earth was impacted by gigantic ice meteors? Couldn’t the impacts by something like these increase global warming and justify the increased volume of water covering the Earth?
Maybe this is the answer:
If your cell phone doesn’t have an internal compass, a magnetic sensor, you will have to use it manually. That may be why they were unable to orient themselves using the stars. They were used to the automatic mode.
The things that actually killed this movie for me (aside from Kevin Costner being smugly himself) were the rusty jet skis and cat boats. It was just sooooooo dumb. Mystical Mad Max wannabe level. Dunderdome.
I think it’s got some flaws, but is fairly great overall. It’s an updated Hope-Crosby Road movie with some welcome subversive subtext. Beatty and Hoffman aren’t really naturals at this sort of schtick, but I think they somehow work anyway, perhaps the actors’ out-of-placeness mirrors the characters.
The caps wouldn’t do it, but there is one hypothesis that the Earth’s mantle a bunch of hydroxide.
Personally I don’t buy it, but it’s at least a better science fiction premise than Waterworld.
I used different words:
Then there is the increased volume of the currently liquid water that would come with the required rise in temperature.
Arctic Greenland holds ten percent of earth’s freshwater. When melted, it will contribute more than seven meters to the rising sea levels. About one sixth of the current rise attributes to our melting of Greenland every year.
I’d heard of that, and I’ve read some of Ballard’s other novels, but never that one. On to the reading list with you, The Drowned World. 
he wrote a couple ( a few? ) environmental apocalypse books
he really seemed to like to write stories in sets
Is this where to mention Vonnegut and Cat’s Cradle
I can’t tell what projection or scale that is. That is a truly terrible map.
Hmm I dunno about that. I mean, if it were a world-spanning wall of land, sure, it would sift everything out of the sea sooner or later, but a lil’ island?
Ocean currents have a semi-permanent geography even in the real world (which is how you get doldrums and “trash vortices” and so on), and it seems like a world with an uninterrupted fluid surface would, like Jupiter and other gas giants, be made up of stable coriolis bands. So if you were more or less drifting, you’d just spend your whole life going round and round at the same latitude.
You could sail North or South on purpose, but (a) why, if there’s nowhere to go and (b) by the same reasoning there would be horse latitudes where you could get stuck and die. The movie does claim that a few people (Dennis Hopper & the Pittsburgh Steelers) still have fossil fuels lol, but even so, why would they venture into areas where there’s no one else around to pillage? So I can totally buy that Dry Land is never discovered by accident.
That said, if it’s not somewhere that you’d run into it by accident, it’s hard to believe anyone could find it on purpose, either. On a world with no landmarks, no satellites, and no good technology, it would be very hard to navigate to a precise longitude. Iirc the “map” in the movie is just some CJK characters tattooed on a minor for some reason, so at least they had the sense to be cryptic about how that’s supposed to work.
The single dumbest bit of worldbuilding is the bad guys having all that oil when no one’s seen land for generations. And apparently the only people who’ve managed to conserve their supply this long are the sort of people who basically roll coal on the ocean, using priceless diesel to brush their teeth & what not. What kind of environmental message is that?
And another thing! What, in this scenario, is so great about Dry Land anyway? People live on boats now. Why exactly are we so happy that an elite minority gets to cosplay a pastiche of the distant past? The whole thing is basically a thinly-veiled metaphor for middle-class white people fantasising about moving to New Zealand.
A small island, maybe, but we’ve estalished the waterworld island has a 1500m prominence (as depicted) and implicitly part of an archipelagos covering most of the tibetan plateau (as described). 10 degrees of latitude!
*thumps shoe on desk at UN*
This is so true. Two hours in search of the “cosy catastrophe” as Aldiss put it.
