Rising seas? Hundreds of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking

This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. 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.

Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.

No habitable island, none, got smaller:

The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.

It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size, making this value a relevant threshold to define atoll island areal stability. We therefore propose to use this threshold, first, to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy or exploitation, and second, to assess atoll and atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Using this threshold for future island development (e.g., resort island) would considerably limit the risk for new developments to be negatively affected by island areal and positional instability, on condition of also avoiding any human intervention that may alter island sediment budget (e.g., sediment extraction) and natural dynamics (e.g., obstruction of sediment transport and deposition by constructions)

See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.

Coming next, panic that rising oceans are shrinking because islands are expanding. And if you can follow that, there is a job waiting for you at the UNEP.

REFERENCE

Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557

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