A new report seems to fly in the face of many assumptions the scientific community once had about the effects of climate change.
More specifically, the prediction that small islands would shrink and disappear over time as ocean levels rose appears to be dead wrong.
The New York Times covered the surprising survival of atolls, small islands usually formed of coral, in a June 27 report.
Climate reporter Raymond Zhong spent time with researchers in the Maldives — which is made up of atolls — trying to figure out why disaster hadn’t set in as predicted.
It was first discovered that global warming might not destroy atolls in a 2018 study published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change.
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise,” that study said. “A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.”
This was not the expected result.
Climate scientists believed rising sea levels created by a global warming-generated melting of ice sheets would drastically reduce the size of small islands.
But that didn’t happen.
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Even if melting ice sheets result in higher water levels, the coral reefs will survive, scientists told Zhong.
The survival of the islands was credited to a few different factors previously unaccounted for.
For one, scientists knew rising water levels would bring larger currents that would erode island shorelines.
However, what they didn’t account for was the fact that these levels would bring with them more sediment to replace that which was eroded.
One researcher was confident that there would still be atolls in the Maldives 100 years from now.
Low-lying tropical island nations were expected to be early victims of rising seas. But research tells a surprising story: Many islands are stable. Some have even grown. Our climate reporter explains how islands in the Maldives are changing. https://t.co/fHm29wI1io pic.twitter.com/D0fQSSES1y
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 28, 2024
The Times article ended on an incredibly promising note for the many climate change pessimists out there.
Jon Barnett, a geographer at the University of Melbourne, said the survival and adaption of the Maldives showed that climate change might not, in fact, be an existential threat to any nation.
“If we can solve climate-change adaptation for atolls — ‘solve’ is the wrong word — then we can do it anywhere,” Barnett said.
