GLOBAL WARMING: All the Disappearing Islands

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GLOBAL WARMING: All the Disappearing Islands

 

 

MotherJones.com / News / Feature

 

All the Disappearing Islands

As the ice caps melt and oceans rise, will Tuvalu become a modern Atlantis?

 

Julia Whitty

July/August 2003

 

From the air the tiny islets of Funafuti atoll appear as a broken pearl

necklace scattered on the blue throat of the tropical sea. No other land is

in sight, only an ocean without end and its own billowy breath rising as

cumulus clouds that seem far more substantive than the tiny landforms

below. As the twin-engine turboprop banks for final approach, the atoll

assumes the classic dimensions of a desert island -- a sand outpost studded

with coconut palms and surrounded by impossibly huge swells topped with

wave crests longer than the island is wide. This leaves me to ponder, as

Charles Darwin did, how " these low hollow coral islands bear no proportion

to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise; and it seems wonderful

that such weak invaders are not overwhelmed, by the all-powerful and

never-tiring waves of that great sea. "

 

Although Darwin eventually discovered the reef-building mechanisms of

corals that keep atoll islands from succumbing to the waves, even his

prescient mind never considered the dread possibilities of the 21st

century: that global warming could cause the sea to expand and rise faster

than the corals could fortify themselves against it, and that these fragile

spits of sand might disappear beneath the waves that tossed them into being

in the first place.

 

Today, roughly 1 million people live on coral islands worldwide, and many

more millions live on low-lying real estate vulnerable to the rising waves.

At risk are not just people, but unique human cultures, born and bred in

watery isolation. Faced with inundation, some of these people are beginning

to envision the wholesale abandonment of their nations. Others are buying

higher land wherever they can. A few are preparing lawsuits that will

challenge the right of the developed world to emit the greenhouse gases

threatening to cause the flooding of their homelands. But whatever their

actions or inactions, the citizens of tropical island nations are likely

destined to become the world's first global-warming refugees -- although

they contribute only 0.6 percent of greenhouse-gas pollution.

 

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