Landlocked Islanders | Hacker News Reader

Landlocked Islanders

hakaimagazine.com

22 pointsThevet14 comments

I recently visited the San Blas Islands of Panama [0]. I've heard of sinking islands like the Maldives before, but it was almost like a punch-in-the-face when I saw it firsthand. We visited some sunken islands, previously home to families, now entirely sunk where the ocean floor was only 6 inches or so deep. I noticed on other islands the remnants of dead coconut trees on the fringe of where water meets land, meaning that previously the shore had been further out enough to let the coconut tree previously flourish.

We also visited islands that had separated due to the rising ocean, but because of the slowness of the change, you could walk back and forth between the islands. However, time will march on and it will sometime not be possible.

I was told that the local indigenous peoples that live on the islands, the Kuna, have a plan to move back to the mountains in the mainland in 40 years.

Some photos (not mine) closely resembling what I saw: http://www.pirancafe.com/2014/12/02/sinking-san-blas-islands...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Blas_Islands

The main expense of building an artificial island is the massive amount of material that is needed to be laid beneath the habitable patch of land, all the way down to the sea floor. Seeing that if you are already level with (or only slightly below) the surface, your job is almost done, how much would it cost to dump concrete, rock, and sand on top of the atolls, to either keep them from submerging, or make them emerge once more?

Build dikes, keep pumping out the water as it seeps back in or rains down. A good chunk of NL is below sea level and that's how they did it (with old school tech like windmills no less, just use enough of them and it will work).

Take a look at the map of the Marshall Islands. Here's a satellite view of Majuro, where the capital is located - https://www.google.com/maps/@7.1298596,171.2318474,28259m/da... .

Like all atolls, it's a very thin circle enclosing a lagoon. By my estimate it's about 100 meters wide, from ocean shore to lagoon shore.

As a very rough estimate, 1 meter of dike height needs 3 meters of surface, so 6% of the island will be a dike. The Dutch can do this because their dikes enclose a lot of land. That's not possible here.

The Dutch also have good soil and rainfall. The ground of the Marshall Islands is made of porous coral. aaron695 elsewhere in these comments pointed to a NatGeo article at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150213-tuvalu-sop... . Towards the bottom is a picture with the caption 'Flooding during king tides is a problem on Fongafale, when water percolating up through the coral matrix laps even at the door of the meteorological office.'

Thus, dikes won't prevent salt water from percolating through the coral under the dikes and flooding the other side.

It looks as if the situation is not one that would benefit from interference by man as it is. The eco-system is rather special and any messing around with it is going to make things worse, not better. Some places on earth are simply not fit for human habitation, this may be one of those.

If you wanted to 'go Dutch' on this then it would mean a total transformation of the environment, basically a ring around all of the Marshall Islands anchored to the sea bed. But that would transform the whole thing into a sweetwater archipelago in no time and would likely kill off everything inside it.

This is more or less what happened to an inland sea that we had here, it's now a lake and sweet (IJsselmeer).

"Some places on earth are simply not fit for human habitation"

The last 3,000 years of human habitation on those islands would suggest that this is not one of those places.

It's not the last 3000 years that determine fitness, it's the next 50.

Then why did you not write 'Some places on earth are no longer fit for human habitation'?

Because that's clearly true. All of those old strip mines, and Superfund sites, and nuclear test sites, and the region around Chernobyl, and the former fishing towns of the Aral Sea are trivial examples of how sites have been rendered less fit for human habitation.

However, that logic of the argument is a bit silly, since it sets aside considering how human agency may be responsible for the removal of that part of the human ecosystem.

There really are places which "are simply not fit for human habitation" include the top of Mt. Everest, effectively all of Antarctica (the few highly subsidized settlements not withstanding), and a number of small islands (like Bishop Rock). The Marshall Islands do not fit into that category.

Is it all feasible to build groynes around the islands to trap sand, and then, say, use bulldozers to pull the sand inland as it accumulates?

Groyne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groyne

With a surface area of 181 sq. km * 1 meter thick = 181,000,000 cubic meters. I'm seeing numbers like $20/ton for sand and rocks and there's not quite 2 tons of sand / cubic meter, giving $7 billion in materials, or $100K/person or >50x the GDP.

Plus transport costs, which I can't even begin to estimate.

And that's mostly just to cover the estimated sea level rise since the 1950s. It doesn't handle 3 meter waves from the recent storm events.

And of course this doesn't change the decrease in rainfall.

Do we get this article has nothing to do with global warming?

These islands are not 'sinking' due to rising sea changes, they are just over populated and destroying natural resources, a common thread for humans.

They also can no longer handle the natural movements of the shore due to this.

> No one I spoke to knows anyone who’s yet left the country because of climate change.

This line sums it up.

Why even with the future ocean rises they might not be affected or can just work around it -

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150213-tuvalu-sop...

Assuming they solve their bigger issues first.

"This line sums it up."

How so? We didn't wait until people started leaving Punta Arenas and other cities, because of ozone depletion, before we banned CFCs.

"Why even with the future ocean rises they might not be affected or can just work around it"

And people can just work around the higher UV level by wearing sunblock or garments with better sun protection, or walking around with umbrellas.

In any case, your NatGeo link pointed out how even if rising sea levels aren't an issue, ocean acidification, shifting rainfall, and more severe storms are still the expected consequences of a changed climate:

> Besides the damage inflicted by sea-level rise itself—coastal erosion, surface flooding, and saltwater intrusion into soil and groundwater—they will suffer from increasingly frequent and severe weather extremes (droughts and cyclones) and die-offs of their coral reefs through ocean warming and acidification, leading to potential collapse of marine ecosystems that provide food and livelihoods for island dwellers.

> ... As Kench sees it, Pacific leaders should get off their soapboxes and invest their energy in thinking strategically about how they'll confront the environmental changes taking place, changes that are causing food security issues and water shortages.

and this Hakai article brings up two of those points (more severe storms, and decreasing rainfall).

So, great. "Sinking" might not be a problem. What about the other expected problems?

> For generations, Marshallese called their home Aelõñ Kein Ad

Nope: "Aelõñ" is the pidgin version of the English word "island". It's a bizarrely common import in many Polynesian languages, eg. the Cook Islands are the Kūki 'Āirani.

When and how did it become that way? If it happened in the late 1800s, then that's still many generations ago. If it happened before 1857, as an imported loan word through other Polynesian speakers, then it even fits in with the context.

What did they call the place before the English came? The Wikipedia entry says "The islands were historically known by the inhabitants as “jolet jen Anij” (Gifts from God)", though the citation is to http://www.pacificrisa.org/places/republic-of-the-marshall-i... which says "The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is historically referred to in folklore as “jolet jen Anij” (gifts from God)." But names from folklore can be different than actual names (eg, "The Promised Land"/"Land of Israel"), and what little evidence I found suggests that is the case here.

For what it's worth, the embassy of the Marshall Islands in DC at http://www.rmiembassyus.org/History.htm says:

> 500 BC - 2000 BC (approx.) - The first Micronesian navigators arrive in the Marshalls, calling the atolls Aelon Kein Ad (Our Islands).

though without a written language it's surely hard to know the words used 2500 years ago.

And in 'The Sea - The Marshallese World' by Dirk H.R. Spennemann at http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/culture/SeaNavigat... :

> The Marshallese had no perception of the atolls of the Marshall Islands as a geographical entity differentiated from other entities. They called them Aelon Kein Ad, "our atolls" and called themselves accordingly: Armij Aelon Kein, "people of these islands". [3]

Where [3] is "Senfft 1903", which appears to be 'Die Marshall-Insulaner' by Arno Senfft.

I'm willing to say that 115 years counts as "for generations".

I'm also curious how they picked up that pidgin use of English given they were a German Protectorate at this time, and before that were assigned Spanish sovereignty? Can you explain this process?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com