rfmcdonald | [ISL] "As bones of Tangier Island's past resurface, Chesapeake Bay islanders fret about their future (Reply)

Steve Szkotak's Associated Press article about Tangier Island, a long-settled community in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay that is facing a rising sea level, is a compelling read. There are numerous anecdotes of locals facing the literal drowning and dissolution of their home--the article opens with one resident coming across a ravaged cemetary.

Once inhabited by up to 1,000 residents, the island's current population of 500 is crowded today on several ridges of high ground, still only several feet above sea water.

It's not just rising seas alone, however, that make Tangier Island so vulnerable and Moore so fearful it will be consumed by the bay.

Tangier Island is sinking, the result of events eons ago.

First, 35 million years ago, a meteor slammed into the lower bay and land continues to seep into its crater. Then, the glaciers that gouged out the 200-mile-long bay 10,000-15,000 years ago, are also causing land to sink. A climate scientist compared this effect, called subsidence, to squeezing a jelly-filled ball.

Climate change is simply accelerating what they say will be increasing flooding along the bay and the foreseeable demise of Tangier. Some areas of the island are losing up to 15 feet or more of land a year.

They make portions of coastal Virginia, such as the Norfolk and Virginia Beach areas, among the 10 most-threatened places on the planet by rising seas.

For Tangier, the future appears particularly grim.

"We have a pretty high degree of certainty that things are going to get wetter and wetter," said Carlton J. Hershner Jr., a climate-change scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of a report on its impacts in coastal Virginia. "Not to be a bearer of bad news for Tangier, but that would suggest that sometime in the next 50 to 100 years the island would basically be under water."