America's first climate refugees? Report predicts hundreds will flee Tangier Islands
On a remote island in the Chesapeake Bay, residents of Tangier Islands go about business as usual. People work as commercial crabbers or oyster fisherman, and travel about the island's 1.2 square miles in golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation. A trusty mail boat pulls into the harbor daily to deliver food and supplies, rain or shine.
There's just one problem: The islands are disappearing beneath their feet.
Climate change and extreme weather events affect low-lying coastal areas around the world, including, most famously, the far-off islands Kiribati and the Maldives.
Here in the US, rising sea levels threaten to submerge Virginia's Tangier Islands underwater in the next 100 years, according to a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers published in the journal Scientific Reports in December 2015.
The authors of the study believe if preventative action is not taken, Tangier's residents may need to be relocated as early as 2040 — becoming the first climate change refugees in the continental US.
Here's what it's like to live there.
Additional reporting and photos by Christian Storm.
Looking out from a dock in Crisfield, Maryland, you just might miss the Tangier Islands on the horizon. Only the water tower is visible from the US mainland.
Located in the heart of Chesapeake Bay, Captain John Smith and his crew explored the island in 1608. The Pocomoke Indians camped there long before then.
Back in the seventeenth century, Tangier existed as a single plot of land. But rising sea levels flooded it and broke the mass into a constellation of islands.
Today, between 500 and 700 full-time residents call one inhabitable patch of Tangier home. But that may change sooner than we think ...
According to a new report by the US Army Corps of Engineers, over 66% of Tangier's landmass has disappeared underwater since 1850.
The islands are located in what researchers call a "hot spot" of sea level rise, where water swallows the land at a much higher rate than the global mean.
There are a few forces at play here. The Laurentide ice sheet, which once covered Canada and much of the northern US, is melting and likely flooding the bay in a process called glacial rebound.
Source: NASA
Additionally, groundwater pumping causes rocks and fine-grained sediments beneath the surface to compact. When the rock falls in on itself, the land drops.
Source: US Department of the Interior
If historic rates of land loss and sea level rise continue, researchers expect the islands will be completely flooded by 2106, possibly as early as 2070.
The damage may be severe enough that residents — many whose families have known each other for decades — will be forced to abandon Tangier by 2040.
Some locals haven't seen the mainland in years. There was never reason to leave. Most residents earn a living as "watermen," collecting blue crabs and oysters and delivering their bounty to a fishing boat that comes daily.
The community is quiet, strongly religious, and dry, with booze unavailable for purchase. "Everybody drinks, but they do it inside the house," a resident told Business Insider last year.
Source: Business Insider
The locals speak in a heavy accent native to the islands, which is equal parts Southern twang and English brogue. The traces of Elizabethan English are leftover from the working-class Brits who settled on Tangier centuries ago.
Most houses sit dilapidated and abandoned. A resident told Business Insider in 2014 that you could buy a house for about $7 to $10,000.
Source: Business Insider
Because of a lack of space and rising tides that can sometimes sweep bodies out to sea, residents historically bury loved ones in their front yards.
Researchers suggest constructing a breakwater system, like a sea wall, offshore and reinforcing the sand dunes on the eastern shore to prevent further land loss. The project would cost between $20 and $30 million.
The residents of Tangier remain hopeful. "The island ain’t goin' nowhere," one resident told Business Insider in 2014. "They talk about erosion, but it's been here forever and it ain't gone nowhere in forever."
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