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

0:06 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 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

1:37 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 gonna talk about too. We're even gonna talk about the Mississippi Delta and how that is constantly changing and how 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 gonna 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 Mississippi Delta for, you know, generations and hundreds of years, and then all of a sudden we come in 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 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 in 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 anytime 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 islands. And these islands are going to change all the time, and they're just going to adapt, and they're going to change. Not necessarily the case. That's not what this study is actually saying. So we're going to talk about why that's

3:08 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. So, the Maldives are essentially a set of islands that are built from atolls. So, an atoll is 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 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 a over a hundred and eighty different types of islands others are smaller those 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, the Maldives, have people that live off of there, and there are a lot of hotels, there's a tourism industry.

4:34 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 talk to the executive director 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 the 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 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.

5:44 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 uh... obviously these are small island states that are being affected more often than not uh... but we're also seeing like along the coastal areas along north america that have you know had to change the way they they live that change their 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, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail. They had some interesting examples.

6:31 They talk a little bit about atolls. I'll link to the article in case you want to, like it goes into a lot of detail. And I think it's really interesting just to see how atolls are built. You know, what Charles Darwin thought about, he said, such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of the world. He wrote that in 1836 after visiting the Indian Ocean Atoll during, uh, an Indian Ocean Atoll during his voyage on the Beagle. And then, like, some islands, if you look at some islands, they're attached by, like, near the capital of Malé. There are two islands that are attached or connected through bridges and stuff. So there's always something going on. And people live off of fishing communities. They live off of other localized businesses, as well as government things, like government services and government jobs. And so it's a really interesting place. There's one area, Hudavuhu.

7:27 Huvudu, sorry, Huvudu Atoll. And so this atoll is a gourd-shaped ring of about 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% of the islands had lost ground to 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 in a similar proportion, 39%, so just a little less, were relatively stable in the area and even had shifted in shape. So they gained a little bit, shift in shape. So you lost 42%, gained 39% so not a total loss not a big loss and then 20% 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 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 them so precisely why the island 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 used satellite imagery,

8:58 now we've used maps, and we've seen the differences in the islands over these decadal periods, now we're seeing, hey, what happened to these islands? Why did they switch? What are the current dynamics? How is sand being added and deposited on? Some sites that I saw, said that it's 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 it's definitely interesting to see how these things have have changed. One doctoral researcher, her name is Atana Gia Newhouse, scooped up a spadeful of sand and beheld the miniature universe it contained. It said puzzle pieces of fragments of coral and calcareous algae in a mad variety of shapes and textures, crushed shells of bivalves, crustaceans, and single-celled formina, Foraminifera, the sugar white sand particles that parafish churned out, like all this stuff was found as they started to take samples and study those samples. So Ms. Gia Newhouse is going to take it back to the University of Plymouth in England and she'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 it's you know as Dr. Kench says You know, he's like it'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

10:31 know, they're putting in sediment cores trying to get sediments out there. They're There's pictures of installing a wave sensor 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 there's all these different studies that are happening along these islands, these set of 184 islands. and other places around the different atolls, and we're gonna see some results from that over time, and I find that extremely, extremely interesting, because it's something that we need to look at. So looking at the Huvadu Atoll, sorry, I don't really know how to pronounce these, so it says, change has been constant on another island that Dr. Kents has studied, which is Kandala Halagala, I think that's how you pronounce it, which appears in 1969 aerial photos of the Huvudu 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.

11:34 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 a difference in growth. Over the next five years, the eastern tip of the island eroded slightly, and then the western curve of the island expanded. So it looks like there's an area where sand gets eroded, but then it gets maybe deposited back onto 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 potato to a teardrop-like shape. Which is interesting, because these islands still have to have you know, have to monitor the change, 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 pictures down below in this study, where people have had to you know, shore up their area because they built a hotel on an area where the land is eroding, and so much so that it actually exposed, you know, bodies that were buried in the 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

13:05 years ago, about 10 years ago, to sit in on a presentation at a conference that I was at, 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 erode away, And then so they fortified it. They put in man-made structures. So it could be a seawall. It could be sort of like a fortified barrier with rocks. And then there's 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 eroded the sand from one area, the mud or the coastline from one area, and 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 to allow that natural erosion 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

14:35 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 are seeing currents start to shift. We're seeing 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 and others won't. This is sort of an example of where islands won't, but they will shift in shape.

15:17 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 too 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. There's something as the science community and the conservation community and sort of just working with people along, you know, 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 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 in to ruin the areas where they fish, the coral reefs where they fish, 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. 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

16:48 what it really comes down to that's the story I got out of this, you know Whether all the islands are gonna 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 developed country, right? And a lot of times it'll 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 in terms of preserving culture and preserving sort of your ancestors in terms of, you know, eroding away 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. When you think

18:20 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 the makeup of the sand and sediment of the land within those Somalian 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. This is just the beginning. There's gonna be more studies that are gonna 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. 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 in the Beyond Jaws podcast, 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&As with some experts, like maybe some guests we'll have on that will be able to do that. All you have to do is go to speakupforblue.com forward slash ocean app. That's speakupforblue.com. forward slash ocean app all one word a p p 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 gonna 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 app, on your app, and share it, send it to them, text it to them, whatever that

19:53 might be, and I wanna 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