How’s a literal nuclear bunker hanging off the side of a crumbling cliff face for portent symbols of how our society seems to be teetering on the edge of some imminent catastrophe? Not good enough for you? Well, it’s what we’ve got.
The brick building, located near Tunstall on the East Yorkshire coast in the UK, is thought to have been built way back in 1959 as a lookout post in the event of a nuclear war. But it’s now just days away from falling into the sea, the BBC reports, as coastal erosion eats away at the cliff top it’s lodged in.
The state of the bunker is so precarious that the East Riding of Yorkshire Council has asked locals to stay clear of the area both at the top of the cliff and below the bunker, in case of a collapse.
“We live on one of the most eroded coastlines in Europe and this bunker hasn’t got long left, perhaps just a few days,” Davey Robinson, an amateur historian who is filming the bunker’s final days, told the BBC.
At the time of reporting on Tuesday, Robinson said he and his partner have visited the Tunstall site every morning for the past nine days. “We are posting the footage on our YouTube channel and it’s getting interest from around the world,” Robinson said.
The bunker, officially known as the Tunstall Royal Observer Corps Post, is a relic of Cold War era paranoia. According to Robinson, “it was designed so that people could live inside it and just wait for a nuclear explosion to register and they could tell other people in other bunkers around the country.”
Today, however, “it’s a symbol of erosion in this area.”
To an extent, coastal erosion is a natural and inevitable process, but geologists believe it’s being accelerated by rising sea levels from global warming. As it stands, around 17 percent of the UK’s over 10,000 miles of coastline is being affected by erosion — and it’s being deeply felt in communities like Tunstall.
“This whole area is eroding at a rapid rate and to see an actual physical thing moving it just shows what’s happening really,” Robinson told the BBC.
More on the environment: Antarctica’s Former Largest Iceberg Is Now Completely Disintegrating
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