This article discusses how beach front communities, like Tangier Island, is being affected by climate change and sea level rise. In Tangier Island, Virginia, and Joal, Senegal, rising sea levels and temperatures are already erasing a way of life.
Futuristic novels brim with images of coastal cities drowning in rising seas: New York City in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Melbourne in George Turner’s The Drowned Towers, London in Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From. But in some communities, that scenario feels increasingly less like science fiction and more like fate. That’s certainly true for Carol Pruitt Moore who lives on Tangier Island, Virginia—a tiny knob of land in the Chesapeake Bay about an hour’s ferry ride from the mainland. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the island, causing the already rising seas to spill over the streets and into the homes of Tangier’s 481 residents. A few days after the storm, Carol steered her skiff toward the island’s uppermost tip to survey the damage. Along the shoreline, soil was sluicing into the bay each time the waves hit. A human skull floated at the water’s edge—the remains of a body broken free from an eroded grave.
That poignant anecdote opens Earl Swift’s book Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. The island is one of only a few left in the Chesapeake Bay. Its less fortunate siblings—like the once five-mile long Holland Island—have already succumbed to sea-level rise caused by climate change.