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posted by
martyb
on Sunday February 24 2019, @01:29AM
from the I've-got-a-sinking-feeling-about-this dept.
from the I've-got-a-sinking-feeling-about-this dept.
The far-flung Marshall Islands needs to raise its islands if it is to avoid being drowned by rising sea levels, President Hilda Heine has warned.
Plans are underway for national talks on which of the 1,156 islands, scattered over 29 coral atolls, can be elevated in a dramatic intervention to ensure safety on the islands.
...
Most of the islands are less than two metres (6.5 feet) above sea level and the government believes physically raising the islands was the only way to save the Marshall Islands from extinction.
Is the solution a viable one, or are the Marshallese more likely to join the Sea Gypsies?
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Marshall Islands Consider Radical Measures to Survive Rising Sea Levels
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To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
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(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday February 24 2019, @04:14AM (2 children)
Sounds good until you consider how you are going to anchor them. I've seen Mangrove swamps torn apart by a big storm,
I don't know if the Chinese are dredging up the coral around the South China Sea atolls they are claiming, or if they are hauling large rip-rap from the main land, but they definitely seem to have a process down.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @08:18AM
It's a shame china has damaged so much of the south china sea islands in its attempt to claim ownership
they may be in for a huge bill when an actual owner takes them to the international court for settlement
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 24 2019, @01:55PM
Florida had an approach down for dredging canals to make ocean accessible waterfront real-estate. It was so very very damaging to the surrounding environment (and, incidentally, oversupplying the market with waterfront real-estate driving down the value of powerful groups' holdings) that they eventually slapped a moratorium on all dredging that held close to 100% for almost 40 years... the environment does recover, eventually, and they have started to allow limited dredging through an onerous permitting process in the last 10 years or so in areas that can demonstrate minimal environmental (and maximal positive tax revenue) impact.
Dubai recently repeated the same basic approach with their Palm islands, and South Bimini in the Bahamas did a dredging development that turned "worthless" mangrove swamps into a golf resort, but the underwater impacts were similar to Florida - pretty much destroyed the ecosystem for an underwater area much larger than the dry land improved. Give them 50-100 years and the underwater ecosystems will recover, sometimes better than they were before, if you can avoid a constant input of petroleum and other contaminants to the water...
China may not care about the negative "short term" environmental impacts as much as solidifying their sovereign claims against wandering aircraft carriers.
As for anchoring floating islands - that's relatively easy - it's preventing them from breaking up in a storm that's the problem. When mangroves can develop in the shallows, they form a very effective wave-energy dissipation system that preserves the land behind them from storm erosion. Not sure how well they might work while floating - certainly not too well in the open-shallow ocean where large waves break, but I could imagine converting a coral atoll to a more or less vertical breakwater wall and floating a city inside.
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