Andrew Lewin dives into the topic of small islands and their responses to climate change. Highlighting a recent study examining 1,000 islands, the episode explores how these islands are adapting to sea level rise and storm surges. Listeners will discover the controversial findings regarding disappearing islands versus those that are growing and shifting due to changing ocean dynamics. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding how islands are evolving in the face of climate change, particularly for communities like the Maldives.
Tune in to learn more about the fascinating connections between islands, sea level rise, and climate change consequences.
Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/26/climate/maldives-islands-climate-change.html
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One of the key takeaways from the podcast episode is that islands are not necessarily vanishing due to climate change. Contrary to popular belief, some islands are actually growing and shifting in shape. The episode discusses a study that looked at the dynamics of over 1,000 islands, particularly focusing on the Maldives, a set of low-lying islands built from atolls.
The study revealed changes in island dynamics over the last 20 years. While some islands experienced erosion and loss of ground, others remained stable or even grew in size. In the Maldives, for example, nearly 42% of the islands studied had lost ground to erosion, but a similar proportion (39%) were stable or had shifted in shape. Surprisingly, 20% of the islands had grown, with humans even creating new land in some areas.
Specific examples highlighted in the podcast include the Huvadu Atoll in the Maldives, where researchers studied aerial and satellite imagery of 184 islands. They found that while some islands lost ground to erosion, others shifted in shape or grew in size. The episode also mentions the transformation of an island from a potato shape to a teardrop shape over the past half-century, showcasing the dynamic nature of these islands.
Furthermore, the podcast emphasizes the importance of understanding these island dynamics to prepare for the impacts of climate change. By studying how currents, storms, and sediment deposition affect islands, researchers can better predict and adapt to changes. The episode also draws parallels with the Mississippi Delta, where human interventions disrupted natural processes and had to be adjusted to allow for the growth of certain areas.
Overall, the episode underscores the complexity of island dynamics in the face of climate change. It challenges the notion that all islands will vanish, highlighting that some will grow and shift in shape. This information is crucial for coastal communities, conservation efforts, and adaptation strategies to protect and preserve these island environments in the future.
Monitoring island dynamics is crucial to understand changes and impacts on residents and businesses. The episode highlights the importance of studying how islands are adapting to climate change, sea level rise, and other environmental factors. The study discussed in the podcast focused on over 1,000 islands, including the Maldives, to analyze how these islands have been shaped by shifting climate change scenarios, such as sea level rise and storm surges.
The Maldives, a set of low-lying islands, have been a prime example of how islands are responding to these changes. Some islands in the Maldives are just six feet above sea level, making them vulnerable to erosion and sea level rise. The study revealed that while some islands experienced erosion and loss of ground, others remained stable or even grew in size. This dynamic nature of islands underscores the need for continuous monitoring to understand the changes and their impacts on residents and businesses.
By monitoring island dynamics, researchers can track erosion, land loss, and changes in shape over time. This information is crucial for predicting future trends and implementing measures to protect communities living on these islands. For instance, the study mentioned how some areas in the Maldives had to shore up their land due to erosion, which exposed buried bodies from a cemetery and a mosque. Preserving cultural heritage and ensuring the safety of residents are key considerations in island monitoring efforts.
Furthermore, the episode discussed the case of the Mississippi Delta, where human interventions like seawalls and man-made structures disrupted natural erosion and deposition processes. This interference had unintended consequences, highlighting the importance of understanding and respecting natural dynamics in coastal areas.
In conclusion, monitoring island dynamics is essential for assessing changes, predicting future impacts, and implementing adaptive measures to protect residents and businesses. By studying how islands evolve in response to environmental challenges, researchers can provide valuable insights for coastal communities to adapt and thrive in the face of climate change.
Collaboration with coastal communities is crucial in preparing for and adapting to changes caused by climate change. The episode highlights the importance of working closely with people living in small island states, like the Maldives, to understand how their islands are adapting to sea level rise and other climate change impacts. These communities are directly affected by the changing dynamics of their islands, and their knowledge and experiences are invaluable in developing effective strategies for resilience.
The episode discusses how researchers studied over 1,000 islands, including the Maldives, to observe changes in island dynamics over time. By analyzing aerial and satellite imagery, researchers found that some islands were eroding while others were growing or shifting in shape. This information underscores the need for ongoing monitoring and collaboration with local communities to understand the reasons behind these changes and to plan for the future.
Furthermore, the episode mentions the importance of preserving cultural heritage and ancestral sites on these islands. As erosion and sea level rise threaten these areas, it becomes essential to work with coastal communities to protect their history and traditions. By involving these communities in decision-making processes and providing them with the necessary tools and knowledge, it ensures that their needs and concerns are addressed in adaptation strategies.
The episode also draws parallels with the Mississippi Delta, where human interventions disrupted natural processes and had unintended consequences. This serves as a cautionary tale, emphasizing the importance of understanding and respecting the natural dynamics of coastal areas. By collaborating with coastal communities, scientists, conservationists, and policymakers can develop sustainable solutions that consider both environmental and social factors.
In conclusion, the episode highlights that collaboration with coastal communities is not only essential but also beneficial in preparing for and adapting to climate change impacts. By working together, we can create resilient and sustainable strategies that protect both the environment and the livelihoods of those living in vulnerable coastal areas.
Welcome back to another episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast on today's episode. We're going to be talking about the wonders of islands and why a new study is kind of potentially adding more controversy to whether islands, some islands will disappear and how some islands are actually growing and just shifting in changes with oceans and sea level rise and climate change consequences. So we're going to talk about the controversy that it could cause. We're going to talk about the study in itself. We're going to talk about why people in the Maldives should be knowing how their islands are adapting to sea level rise. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin. This is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about climate change and sea level rise and how small islands are reacting to climate change. It's really interesting. There's a great article that provides a lot of insight into the study where researchers looked at about 1,000 islands and they looked at the dynamics of those islands and how they've been reacting to shifting sort of like climate change scenarios like especially with sea level rise and storm surges and how that islands or how those islands have been shaped in that time and are they, you know, are some islands disappearing or other islands, you know, moving in different areas? Are they building in some areas and not in others? And there's a lot of things that we're going to talk about too. We're even going to talk about the Mississippi Delta and how that is constantly changing and how, you know, humans have been kind of putting in their own way of adaptation sort of scenarios and solutions that may or may not have worked in the past and are going back to sort of natural solutions. We're going to talk a little bit about that as well because it kind of takes, you know, it matters in this situation. It matters how these dynamics have been playing for, like in small islands and in Delta Mississippi Delta for, you know, generations and hundreds of years and then all of a sudden we come in and we as humans and we try and change things and it doesn't really change. And then we're going to talk about like, does this matter in when we're talking about climate change? You know, it's really interesting because the article is on the New York Times and the comments section is kind of interesting on the New York Times. I don't subscribe to the New York Times. I got this sort of like free deal with them for a temporary time and I decided to look at the article and I decided to look at the comments and any time you you try and put an article up about climate change, you get a lot of deniers, a lot of climate change deniers coming in and of course they're just filled in the comments saying, oh, we told you this whole time that you're not going to see disappearing, disappearing islands and you know, these islands are going to change all the time and then they're just going to adapt and they're going to change. Not necessarily the case. It's not what this study is actually saying so we're going to talk about why that's important to know but why it's important to know to gather data and to study these island dynamics because it's important. It's important for the people who live on those islands. We're going to focus today's study mostly on the Maldives and so the study that looked at a number of different islands. So like I said, over a thousand islands looked at how these islands changed and the Maldives are essentially a set of islands that are built from a toll. So it's holds essentially sort of a ring around what used to be a volcano. The volcano sinks down and then you have these ring of islands and then coral reefs that kind of fill the area where the where the the volcano is and you get this beautiful set of islands. And you know in some areas you get you know a chain of islands that are like over 180 different types of islands. Others are smaller, others are larger. It really just depends. But the Maldives are a set of these islands that have been an example of how you know these islands have this country has been adapting to the sort of climate change and sea level rise. They are very low-lying islands. Some of them are just like six feet above sea level and others are obviously a little bit bigger than that. But they're populated. There's this set of islands these the Maldives have people that live off there and there are a lot of hotels. There's a tourism industry. There's a lot of things that go on there. If you're not familiar with the Manitrust, the Manitrust was sort of born out of the Maldives and there's a really great episode in the Beyond Jaws podcast where we talked to the executive director of the Man of the Manitrust and you should check that out. I'll put the link in the show notes. But it's a really interesting set of islands and it's a very interesting set especially when it comes to climate change and sea level rise and how these islands are going to adapt. Now the gist of the article is essentially these islands aren't really vanishing that we thought. And we looked over it last 20 years and the researchers saw changes in the island dynamics. So some islands grew in some places but also withered away and eroded away in others. These are sand-based islands and some areas just sort of disappeared and some grew in other areas of that particular island. Which is interesting because we've been told this entire time that these islands would disappear. They would just you know the the water would just take over the island. It would just engulf it and the people would have to leave. And some islands in like the South Pacific, that's happened already. We've had people having to just get up and they become what we call climate refugees and they have to be you know relocated to another place losing their culture, losing their history for generations. Obviously these are small island states that are being affected more often than not. But we're also seeing like along coastal areas along North America that have you know had to change the way they they live that to change the the way they live along their coastline and try to fortify that coastline by any means necessary to maintain where they can live. Not easy to do and expensive super super expensive and it doesn't always work which we'll get into in just a little bit. These islands though are going to go into a little bit more detail. They had some they had some interesting examples. They talked a little bit about a tolls. I'll link to the article in case you want to like it goes into a lot of different a lot of detail. And I think it's really interesting just to see how a tolls are built. You know what Charles Darwin thought about such formations surely ranked high amongst the wonderful objects of the world. He wrote that in 1836 after visiting the Indian Ocean at all during an Indian Ocean at all during his voyage on the Beagle. And then like some islands if you look at some islands they're attached by like the near the capital of Malay there there are two islands that are attached or connected through bridges and stuff. So like there's always something going on and there you know people live off of as fishing communities. They live off of other you know sort of localized businesses as well as government things like government government services and government jobs. And so it's a really interesting place. There's one area Huda vu vu hu vadu sorry hu vadu tall at all. And so this at all is a gourd shaped ring of 241 islands in the southern Maldives. And the researchers studied aerial and satellite imagery of 184 of those islands to see how they changed in recent decades. So we're looking at tens of years as they've changed. Nearly 42 percent of the islands had lost ground to the two erosion. So we're still seeing erosion. And if you go to the article on the New York Times you'll see sort of the highlights of what areas were lost and what parts of the islands were lost. But a similar proportion 39 percent so just a little little less were relatively stable in the area and even had shifted in shape. So they were they gained a little bit shifting shape. So you lost 42 percent gained 39 percent. So not a total loss. Not a big loss. And then 20 percent of the islands actually grew. And a few of them because humans had created new land. So there were instances especially in the capital of Mali where humans actually added land to the inner parts of the island where there was water and so it built more land. So that's like you know that's a lot of proactive or even reactive sort of I guess it's proactive trying to build up land so more people can live off of them. So precisely why the islands shrank while others did not is what scientists are hoping to now figure out. So that's the big question here. It's like now that we've you know used satellite imagery now we've used maps and we've seen the differences in the islands over these you know decadal periods. Now we're seeing hey like what happened to these islands? How why do they switch? What are the current dynamics? How is sand being added and deposited on? Some some sites that I saw said that is just like sort of you know these sand that the water is actually taking the sand just depositing into higher areas and then receding. So maybe even causing its own barrier. I'm not too sure I'm not a physical oceanographer so I don't really know all of the details. But it's definitely interesting to see how these things have have changed. You know one doctoral researcher her name is Atana Jia Nuhas. A scooped up a spade full of sand and beheld the miniature universe it contained said puzzle pieces of fragments of coral and Calcares algae in a mad variety of shapes and textures crushed shells of bivalves crustaceans and single cell formula for a minifra. The sugar white sand particles that Perifis turned out like all this stuff was found as they started to take samples and study those samples. So Miss Jia Nuhas is going to take it back to the University of Plymouth in England and it's going to start classifying and counting the grains and piece to piece together how these islands came to be. So this could just be like coral rock that's being deposited along. So it's you know as Dr. Kench says you know he's like detective work. You know I think it's really interesting. He says basically it's a forensics exercise of like what's happening. You know they're putting in sediment cores trying to get sediments out there. There's pictures of installing a wave sensors to see how those waves are then they go to the bottom of the ocean and install a device to measure currents at the depth of about 65 feet. So all these different studies that are happening along these islands is the set of 184 islands and other places around the different atolls and you're and we're going to see some you know some results from that over time and I find that like extremely extremely interesting because it's something that you know we need to look at. So the looking at the hoovadoo atoll. So I don't really know how to pronounce these. So it says change has been constant on another island that Dr. Kench has studied which is candelahala galah. I think that's how I pronounce it. Which appears in 1969 area photos of the of the hoovadoo atoll. And then it says he and his colleagues measured the edge of vegetation in the photo then compared their findings to recent satellite imagery. And by 2005 the edge had shifted to the south the northern side of the islands had eroded and the southern side had grown. So quite you know quite a difference in growth. After the next five over the next five years the eastern tip of the island eroded slightly slightly and then the western curve of the island expanded. So it looks like there's like an area where sand gets eroded but then it gets maybe deposited back on to the different parts of the island. And then later a new point actually formed and widened and the island didn't shrink over the past half century but its shape transformed from a photo to a teardrop which is or from a potato to a teardrop like shape. Which is interesting because it's still like these islands still have to have you know have to monitor the change of the shift because it could affect residences. It could affect businesses. It could affect people living on the island and how they're living on the island. There might be areas and there's there's pictures down below in this in this study where you know people have had to you know shore up their area because they built a hotel on an area where the the land is eroding and so much so that it actually it actually exposed you know bodies that were buried in a cemetery and from a mosque. And you know that obviously is sacred that's cultural and so those areas need to be protected. Now similarly in the Mississippi Delta which I had a chance a number of years ago but ten years ago to sit in on a presentation at a conference that I was at the Coastal Zone Canada Conference. Engineers had talked about what the Mississippi Delta looked like before like in the 1960s and 1970s and then after as they started to see parts of the areas rode away and then so they fortified it. They put in man-made structures so it could be a sea wall it could be sort of like a fortified barrier with rocks and then like there's a like a cage over those rocks we see that a lot with river systems inland. There are a lot of just different ways of fortifying that are human-made. The problem with that is it interrupted the regular dynamics of some areas where you know you were eroded the the sand from one area the mud or the coastline from one area and it got that that same eroded material got deposited in other areas along the Delta which actually grew those areas which were significant to a lot of the indigenous people in those areas tribes that were in those areas in Louisiana, southern Louisiana. That obviously had to change the dynamics they had to take away some of the fortified areas so allow that natural erosion to to happen so that other areas could be built up. The moral of this story is to say don't start to interfere right off the bat because if you interfere right off the bat you don't know what you're messing up down the road that's natural and that people could be relying on. Looking at island structure and looking at how islands change over decades and even over centuries in some cases that we have data is tricky. You can't predict where things are going to go unless you start to know how currents are going to change or how they behave and that could change through climate change effects. We we are seeing currents start to shift. We're seeing like upwelling shift in areas. These are things that we need to monitor having more data to monitor the security of these islands whether they disappear and some islands will disappear under the water. Now there's won't. This is a sort of an example of where islands won't but they will shift in the shape and that shape will matter in the future. Do you build on the new parts of the shape? Do you actually add it yourself as humans and we interfere with the natural processes? Is that going to interfere with anything else? These are all questions that we need to ask ourselves to and I'm sure there are many more with people who are smarter than I in this and that's not hard to do in this sort of subject matter. It's something that we have to ask. This is something as the science community and the conservation community and sort of just working with people along small island states. We need to know this. We need to know how things are going to change and how it's going to affect people in the islands. We talked last episode with with Rocky from Rare and she was talking about how they're working on creating savings accounts for the fishing community so that in case a typhoon comes in or some kind of cyclone comes in or some kind of storm that comes into ruin the areas where they fish. The coral reefs where they fish you know they have to rebuild that marine protected area and they might be out of fish for a while. They have a savings bank to actually help them out and help them recoup faster than they would if they weren't able to catch any fish due to these scenarios. So there's a lot to go into this. There's a lot to make sure that specific island nations and specific areas will be protected and they will be prepared to handle a lot of different things that are happening within you know island dynamics. That's what it really comes down to. That's the story I got out of this. You know whether there are all the islands are going to sink, whether all the islands are going to survive and build and get bigger. We don't know. Some islands will. Some islands won't. Some cultures and some people will have to move. They will become climate refugees. Sometimes it might be in a small island state. Other times it might be in a province or a state in North America or Europe or Asia or somewhere else in the world where you think it's a developing it's a developed country right and a lot of times will happen in developing countries. The idea is to work with more people working with coastal communities to ensure that the methods and the processes that are put in place protect them from those changes. Protect them to allow them to adapt to those changes whether it be on a physical level whether it be on an environmental level whether it be on sort of an emotional level like when terms of preserving culture and preserving sort of your ancestors in terms of you know eroding a way of of cemeteries and so forth. You know those are the things that need to be protected. Those are the things that need to be taken into account and preparing those areas, preparing those islands with the knowledge and the tools that can help them. Some of them may have already started it and some of them may have already known about this for years and they don't need outside help but some of them will and that's where we come in as a conservation community that's what we do. So I just wanted to cover that story clear up some things it's not as controversial as you think but science is science and you just know you know when you think something's going to happen to everything it's usually not the case it's usually very unique to you know island dynamics and how currents and and the makeup of the sand and sediment of the land within those small island states you know adapt to different currents and to different storms and to different storm surges and all that kind of stuff. So there's lots to know about this is just the beginning there's going to be more studies that are going to be out but if you want to stay in touch you can do so by subscribing to this podcast you can also you know talk to me you know I've got an app coming out that's going to be all about this community all about the audience that's listening to this podcast the audience and the Beyond Jaws podcast you know and people who are interested in the field of marine science and conservation you can get access to our newsletter there you'll be able to get access to me and have some Q&A's with some experts like some maybe some guests will have on they will be able to do that all you have to do is go to speakupforblue.com/oceanapp that's speakupforblue.com/oceanapp all one word APP put in your email it's free I don't sell it I don't trade it I don't do anything with your email other than contact you with some updates on the app and there have been some updates I've got some designs it looks pretty cool I'm going to share them this week and I can't wait so that's it for today's episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got a lot from it and if you know someone who might want to listen to it please feel free to share that with them just hit the copy button on their on their app and on your app and share it send it to them text it to them whatever that might be and I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast have a great day we'll talk to you next time and happy conservation (upbeat music)
