Island Dynamics: Shifting Shapes and Changing Landscapes in the Face of Sea Level Rise

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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

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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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community, all about the audience that's listening to this podcast, the audience in

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00:18:58,342 --> 00:19:01,644
the Beyond Jaws podcast, and people who are interested in

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00:19:01,944 --> 00:19:05,226
the field of marine science and conservation. You can get

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access to our newsletter there. You'll be able to get access to me and have

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00:19:08,588 --> 00:19:11,889
some Q&As with some experts, like maybe some guests we'll

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00:19:11,929 --> 00:19:16,512
have on that will be able to do that. All you have to do is go to speakupforblue.com forward

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00:19:16,532 --> 00:19:20,494
slash ocean app. That's speakupforblue.com. forward

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00:19:20,514 --> 00:19:24,258
slash ocean app all one word a p p put

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00:19:24,318 --> 00:19:27,662
in your email it's free i don't sell it i don't trade it i don't do anything

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with your email other than contact you with some updates on the

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00:19:31,464 --> 00:19:34,546
app, and there have been some updates. I've got some designs. It

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00:19:34,566 --> 00:19:37,968
looks pretty cool. I'm gonna share them this week, and I can't wait. So

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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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it, and if you know someone who might want to listen to it, please feel

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free to share that with them. Just hit the copy button on their

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app, on your app, and share it, send it to them, text it to them, whatever that

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might be, and I wanna thank you so much for listening to this episode of

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the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time. and