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Island Dynamics: Shifting Shapes and Changing Landscapes in the Face of Sea Level Rise · How To Protect The Ocean

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Welcome back to another episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. On
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today's episode, we're going to be talking about the wonders of
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islands and why a new study is kind of... potentially
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adding more controversy to whether some
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islands will disappear and how some islands are actually growing and
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just shifting in changes with oceans and
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sea level rise and climate change consequences. So we're
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going to talk about the controversy that it could cause. We're going to talk about the
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study in itself. We're going to talk about why people in the Maldives
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should be knowing how their islands are adapting to
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sea level rise. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean
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podcast. Let's start the show. Hey,
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everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm
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your host, Andrew Lewin. This is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how
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you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by
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taking action. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about
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climate change and sea level rise and how small islands
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are reacting to climate change. It's really interesting. There's a
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great article that provides a lot of insight into the
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study where researchers looked at
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about 1,000 islands. And they looked at the dynamics of
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those islands and how they've been reacting to shifting sort
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of like climate change scenarios, like especially with sea level rise and
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storm surges and how that islands or how those islands have
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been shaped in that time. And are they, you know, are
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some islands disappearing or other islands, you know, moving in
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different areas? Are they building in some areas and not in
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others? And there's a lot of things that we're gonna talk about too. We're even gonna talk about
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the Mississippi Delta and how that is constantly changing and
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how humans have been kind of putting in their own
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way of adaptation sort of scenarios and
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solutions that may or may not have worked in the past and
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are going back to sort of natural solutions. We're gonna talk a little bit about
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that as well because it kind of takes You know, it matters
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in this situation. It matters how these dynamics have been playing
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for, like, in small islands and in Mississippi Delta
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for, you know, generations and hundreds of years, and then all of
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a sudden we come in as humans and we try and change things, and
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it doesn't really change. And then we're going to talk about, like, does this matter when
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we're talking about climate change? You know, it's really interesting
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because the article is on the New York Times and the
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comments section is kind of interesting in the New York Times. I don't subscribe to
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the New York Times. I got this sort of like free deal with them for
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a temporary time and I decided to look at the article and I decided to look at the comments
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and anytime you try and put
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an article up about climate change, you get a lot of deniers, a
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lot of climate change deniers coming in. And of course, they're just filled in the comments
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saying, oh, we told you this whole time that you're not going to see disappearing
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islands. And these islands are going to change all
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the time, and they're just going to adapt, and they're going to change. Not necessarily
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the case. That's not what this study is actually saying. So we're going to talk about why that's
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important to know, but why it's important to know to gather data and to study these
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island dynamics, because it's important. It's important for
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the people who live on those islands. We're going to focus today's study mostly
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on the Maldives. And so the study that
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looked at a number of different islands, so like I
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said, over a thousand islands, looked at
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how these islands changed. So, the Maldives are
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essentially a set of islands that are built from atolls. So,
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an atoll is essentially sort of a ring around what
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used to be a volcano. The volcano sinks down and then you
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have these ring of islands and then coral reefs that kind of fill the
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area where the volcano
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is and you get this beautiful set of islands. And, you
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know, in some areas you get, you know, a chain of islands that are like
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a over a hundred and eighty different types of islands others are smaller
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those are larger it really just depends but the maldives are
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a set of these islands that have been an example of
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how you know these islands have this country
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has been adapting to the sort
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of climate change and sea level rise. They are very low-lying islands,
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some of them are just like six feet above sea level, and
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others are obviously a little bit bigger than that, but they're populated. There's
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this set of islands, the Maldives, have people
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that live off of there, and there are a lot of hotels, there's a tourism industry.
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there's a lot of things that go on there. If you're not familiar with
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the Manitrust, the Manitrust was sort of born out of
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the Maldives, and there's a really great episode in
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the Beyond Jaws podcast where we talk to the executive director of
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the Manitrust, and you should check that out, I'll put the link
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in the show notes, but it's a really interesting set of
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islands and it's a very interesting set especially when it comes to climate change and sea
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level rise and how these islands are going to adapt. Now the gist
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of the article is essentially these
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islands aren't really vanishing, that we thought. And we looked over the
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last 20 years, and the researchers saw
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changes in the island dynamics. So some islands grew
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in some places, but also withered away and
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eroded away in others. These are sand-based islands, and
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some areas just sort of disappeared, and some grew
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in other areas of that particular island. which is interesting because
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we've been told this entire time that these islands would disappear. They
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would just, you know, the water would just take over the island, it
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would just engulf it and the people would have to leave. And some
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islands in like the South Pacific, that's happened already.
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We've had people having to just get up and they become what
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we call climate refugees and they have to be you know relocated to
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another place losing their culture losing their history for
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generations uh... obviously these are small island states
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that are being affected more often than not uh... but we're also
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seeing like along the coastal areas along north america that
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have you know had to change the way they they live that
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change their the way they live along their coastline and try
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to fortify that coastline by any means necessary to maintain where
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they can live Not easy to do, and expensive. Super,
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super expensive, and it doesn't always work, which we'll get into in just a little
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bit. These islands, though, I'm going to go into a little bit
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more detail. They had some interesting examples.
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They talk a little bit about atolls. I'll link to the article in case
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you want to, like it goes into a lot of detail. And
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I think it's really interesting just to see how atolls are built. You
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know, what Charles Darwin thought about, he said, such formations surely rank
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high amongst the wonderful objects of the world. He wrote that in
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1836 after visiting the Indian Ocean Atoll during, uh, an
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Indian Ocean Atoll during his voyage on the Beagle. And
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then, like, some islands, if you look at some islands, they're attached by, like,
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near the capital of Malé. There are two
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islands that are attached or connected through bridges and stuff. So there's
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always something going on. And people live off
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of fishing communities. They live off of other localized
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businesses, as well as government things, like government
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services and government jobs. And so it's a
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really interesting place. There's one area, Hudavuhu.
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Huvudu, sorry, Huvudu Atoll. And
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so this atoll is a gourd-shaped ring of
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about 241 islands in the southern Maldives. And
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the researchers studied aerial and satellite imagery of 184 of
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those islands to see how they changed in recent decades. So
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we're looking at tens of years as they've changed. Nearly
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42% of the islands had lost ground to erosion, so
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we're still seeing erosion. And if you go to the article on
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the New York Times, you'll see sort of the highlights of what areas
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were lost and what parts of the islands were lost. But in
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a similar proportion, 39%, so just a
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little less, were relatively stable in the area and
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even had shifted in shape. So they gained
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a little bit, shift in shape. So you lost 42%, gained 39% so
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not a total loss not a big loss and then
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20% of the islands actually grew and a few of them Because humans
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had created new land. So there were instances especially
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in the capital of Mali where humans actually added land to
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the inner parts of the island where there was water and so it built
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more land so that's like you know that's that's a lot of
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proactive or even reactive sort of i guess
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it's proactive trying to build up land so more people can live
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off them so precisely why the island shrank while others did
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not is what scientists are hoping to now figure out. So that's the big
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question here. It's like, now that we've used satellite imagery,
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now we've used maps, and we've seen the differences in the islands over
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these decadal periods, now we're seeing, hey, what
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happened to these islands? Why did they switch? What are the
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current dynamics? How is sand being added
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and deposited on? Some sites that I saw, said
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that it's just like sort of you know these sand that the water is actually taking
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the sand just depositing into higher areas and then receding so
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maybe even causing its own barrier i'm not too sure i'm not a
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physical oceanographer so i don't really know all of the details but
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it's it's definitely interesting to see how these things have
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have changed. One doctoral researcher, her
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name is Atana Gia Newhouse, scooped
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up a spadeful of sand and beheld the miniature universe
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it contained. It said puzzle pieces of fragments of coral and
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calcareous algae in a mad variety of shapes
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and textures, crushed shells of bivalves, crustaceans, and single-celled
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formina, Foraminifera, the sugar white
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sand particles that parafish churned out, like all this stuff was found as
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they started to take samples and study those samples. So
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Ms. Gia Newhouse is going to take it back to the University of Plymouth in England
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and she's going to start classifying and counting the grains and piece to piece
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together how these islands came to be so this could just be
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like coral rock that's being deposited along so it's it's
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you know as Dr. Kench says You
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know, he's like it's like detective work, you know, I think it's really interesting He says
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basically it's a forensics exercise of like what's happening. You
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know, they're putting in sediment cores trying to get sediments out
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there. They're There's pictures of
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installing a wave sensor to see how those waves are. Then they go
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to the bottom of the ocean and install a device to measure currents at
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the depth of about 65 feet. So there's all these different studies
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that are happening along these islands, these set of 184 islands. and
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other places around the different atolls, and we're
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gonna see some results from that over time, and
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I find that extremely, extremely interesting, because
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it's something that we need to look at. So looking
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at the Huvadu Atoll, sorry,
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I don't really know how to pronounce these, so it says, change has been constant on another
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island that Dr. Kents has studied, which is Kandala Halagala, I
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think that's how you pronounce it, which appears in 1969 aerial
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photos of the Huvudu Atoll. And
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then it says, he and his colleagues measured the edge of vegetation in
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the photo, then compared their findings to recent satellite imagery.
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And by 2005, the edge had shifted to the south, the northern
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side of the islands had eroded, and the southern side had
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grown. So quite a difference in growth.
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Over the next five years, the eastern tip of the island eroded slightly, and
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then the western curve of the island expanded. So it looks like there's an
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area where sand gets eroded, but then it gets maybe deposited back
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onto the different parts of the island. And then later, a new
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point actually formed and widened. And
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the island didn't shrink over the past half-century, but its shape
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transformed from a potato to a teardrop-like shape. Which is
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interesting, because these islands still have to have you
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know, have to monitor the change, the shift, because it could
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affect residences, it could affect businesses, it
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could affect people living on the island and how they're living on
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the island. There might be areas, and there's pictures down
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below in this study, where people have
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had to you know, shore up their area because they built
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a hotel on an area where the land is eroding, and
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so much so that it actually exposed,
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you know, bodies that were buried in the cemetery and from a mosque, and,
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you know, that obviously is sacred, that's cultural, and so those areas
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need to be protected. Now, similarly, in the Mississippi
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Delta, which I had a chance a number of
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years ago, about 10 years ago, to sit in on a
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presentation at a conference that I was at, Coastal Zone Canada Conference, engineers
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had talked about what the Mississippi Delta looked like before, like
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in the 1960s and 1970s. And then after, as
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they started to see parts of the areas erode away,
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And then so they fortified it. They put in man-made structures. So
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it could be a seawall. It could be sort of like a fortified barrier
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with rocks. And then there's a cage over those rocks.
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We see that a lot with river systems inland. There
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are a lot of just different ways of fortifying that are human-made. The
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problem with that is it interrupted the regular dynamics of
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some areas where you eroded the sand
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from one area, the mud or the coastline from one area, and that
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same eroded material got deposited in other
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areas along the delta, which actually grew those areas, which
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were significant to a lot of the indigenous
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people in those areas, tribes that were in those areas in Louisiana,
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southern Louisiana. That obviously had
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to change the dynamics. They had to take away some of the fortified areas
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to allow that natural erosion to happen so
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that other areas could be built up. The moral of
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this story is to say, don't start to interfere right
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off the bat. Because if you interfere right off the bat, you don't know
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what you're messing up down the road that's natural and that people
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could be relying on. Looking at island
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structure and looking at how islands change over decades
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and even over centuries in some cases that we have data is
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tricky. You can't predict where things are going to go unless you
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start to know how currents are going to change or
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how they behave. And that could change through climate
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change effects. We are seeing currents start to shift. We're
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seeing upwelling shift in areas. These are things
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that we need to monitor. Having more data to monitor the
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security of these islands, whether they disappear. And some islands will
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disappear under the water and others won't. This is sort of
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an example of where islands won't, but they will shift in shape.
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And that shape will matter in the future. Do you build on
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the new parts of the shape? Do you actually add it yourself as humans and
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we interfere with the natural processes? Is that going
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to interfere with anything else? These are all questions that we
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need to ask ourselves too and I'm sure there are many more with people
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who are smarter than I in this and that's not hard to do in
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this sort of subject matter. It's something that we have to ask.
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There's something as the science community and the conservation community and
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sort of just working with people along, you know,
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small island states. We need to know this. We need to know
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how things are going to change and how it's going to affect
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people in the islands. We talked last episode with
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Rocky from Rare and she was talking about how they're working on
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creating savings accounts for the fishing community so that in case a
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typhoon comes in or some kind of cyclone comes in or some kind
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of storm that comes in to ruin the areas
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where they fish, the coral reefs where they fish, they have to
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rebuild that marine protected area and they might be out of fish for
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a while they have a savings bank to actually help them out
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and help them recoup faster than they would if they weren't able
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to catch any fish due to these scenarios. Island
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nations and specific areas will be protected and
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they will be prepared to handle a lot of different things that
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are happening Within you know island dynamics. That's
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what it really comes down to that's the story I got out of this, you
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know Whether all the islands are gonna sink, whether all the islands
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are going to survive and build and get bigger, we
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don't know. Some islands will, some islands won't. Some cultures
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and some people will have to move. They will become climate refugees. Sometimes
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it might be in a small island state. Other times it might be in a
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province or a state in North America or Europe or Asia or
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somewhere else in the world where you think it's a developed country,
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right? And a lot of times it'll happen in developing countries. The idea is
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to work with more people working with coastal
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communities to ensure that the methods and the
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processes that are put in place protect them from those changes, protect
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them to allow them to adapt to those changes, whether it be on
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a physical level, whether it be on an environmental level, whether it be on
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sort of an emotional level, like in terms of preserving culture
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and preserving sort of your ancestors in terms of, you know, eroding
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away of cemeteries and so forth. You
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know, those are the things that need to be protected. Those are the things that need
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to be taken into account and preparing those areas, preparing those
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islands with the knowledge and the tools that can
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help them Some of them may have already started it, and some of
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them may have already known about this for years, and they don't
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need outside help, but some of them will. And that's where we
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come in as a conservation community. That's what we do. So I just
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wanted to cover that story, clear up some things. It's not as controversial as
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you think, but science is science. When you think
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something's going to happen to everything, it's usually not
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the case. It's usually very unique to, you know, island dynamics and
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how currents and the makeup of the sand and
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sediment of the land within those Somalian states,
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you know, adapt to different currents and to different storms and to different storm
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surges and all that kind of stuff. So there's lots to know about this. This
18:41
is just the beginning. There's gonna be more studies that are gonna be out. But if you want
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to stay in touch, you can do so by subscribing to this podcast. You
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can also, you know, talk to me. I've
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got an app coming out that's going to be all about this
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that's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got a lot from
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