From the “we told you so” department, WUWT Reader Paul Carter says in Tips and Notes:
A new study shows that Pacific Islands are resilient to sea level changes.
“Dynamic atolls give hope that Pacific Islands can defy sea rise”
A study by Paul Kench, Professor, School of Environment at University of Auckland.
“It is widely predicted that low-lying coral reef islands will drown as a result of sea-level rise, leaving their populations as environmental refugees. But new evidence now suggests that these small islands…”
See http://theconversation.com/dynamic-atolls-give-hope-that-pacific-islands-can-defy-sea-rise-25436
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Yes, we told you all about this right here on WUWT back in 2010 in an essay titled “Floating Islands” by Willis Eschenbach. Willis wrote then:
Regarding atolls and sea level rise, the most important fact was discovered by none other than Charles Darwin. He realized that coral atolls essentially “float” on the surface of the sea. When the sea rises, the atoll rises with it. They are not solid, like a rock island. They are a pile of sand and rubble. There is always material added and material being lost. Atolls exist in a delicate balance between new sand and coral rubble being added from the reef, and atoll sand and rubble being eroded by wind and wave back into the sea or into the lagoon. As sea level rises, the balance tips in favor of sand and rubble being added to the atoll. The result is that the atoll rises with the sea level.
Figure 2. Typical cross section through a coral atoll. The living coral is in the ring between the dotted green line and the beach. The atoll used for the photo in this example is Tepoto Atoll, French Polynesia.
Darwin’s discovery also explained why coral atolls occur in rings as in Fig. 2 above. They started as a circular inshore coral reef around a volcanic rock island. As the sea level rose, flooding more and more of the island, the coral grew upwards. Eventually the island was drowned by the rising sea levels, and all that is left is the ring of reef and coral atolls.
Coral atolls have proven over thousands of years that, if left alone, they can go up with the sea level. And if we follow some simple conservation practices, they can continue to do so and to support atoll residents. But they cannot survive an unlimited population increase, or unrestricted overfishing, or overpumping the water lens, or unrestrained coral mining. Those are what is killing the atolls, not the same sea level rise that we’ve had for the last hundred years.
Read it all here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
[UPDATE]
Someone in the comments asked about priority regarding the ideas in my 2010 post.
The person to claim priority for noticing the dynamic nature of atolls is Charles Darwin. Amazingly, he discovered the dynamic nature of coral atolls before he had ever seen one.
However, in terms of priority for my 2010 post, I’d have to cite my 2004 paper in Energy and Environment, the journal that alarmists love to hate on. It was published as a “Viewpoint”, and as such, unlike my other two articles in E&E, this one was not peer-reviewed.
In that study, I traced the origins of the atoll hysteria to a 2003 Sierra Club article. That article is ground zero for the “coral atoll climate refugee we’re all DOOOOMED” meme. What I found was previous research showing that the atoll they said was dying from climate change was actually being eroded because in World War II the protecting outer reef had been cut through.
Finding that previous research showing the actual reason their poster child island was being reshaped was a formative experience for me. That study totally blew the Sierra Club BS out of the water.
Nor is the current study the first recent notice by scientists of the dynamic nature of atolls. See my other post on the subject, “The Irony, It Burns” …
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Doug – it’s not so much scaremongering as plain old ignorance. These people don’t have a clue about anything, they take data collected by someone else, (mis-) apply statistical packages created by someone else, and apply the results to some physical processes that they just don’t even know exist.
This is soft science taken to its (il)logical extreme.
The Monster (@SumErgoMonstro) says:
April 23, 2014 at 7:16 am
“So rising sea levels are no threat to atolls, at all. ”
Sea level rise at a speed of above 25 cm/year should overwhelm the ability of coral to grow vertically. Well you could have looked that one up. Just like Paul Kench and all the alarmists have very likely looked it up long before they went on their “atolls are gonna drown” tour, but the scare was much too good for propaganda to miss, and for Kench, much too good an opportunity to spend some taxpayer money on a pleasure cruise. Well at least Kench has now produced a reminder of something that was known 160 years ago. So maybe we should be thankful for that, as barmy as it is.
Oh excuse me Monster, I didn’t get the pun.
There’s an amazing new study out that says the ground gets wet when it rains out.
Hardly a “discovery”… Check Perrin 1992.
Chris De Freitas has managed to get similar articles posted in the NZ Herald over the last few years, he is in the Dept Geology Auckland Uni, perhaps it might help if the Environment Dept took a walk around campus occasionally.
Runoff and pollution probably do more harm to coral than “rising seas!” or UV radiation. Oil, gas, and garbage are very bad for reefs and fish, and it sucks swimming through it
Addendum to above.
My bad, Chris is Associate Professor School of Environment Auckland University.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11166377
Echoes of Willis in this article
Ho hum. Another imaginary alarmist wolf is dealt with by an increasingly unmoved public. And the alarmist crowd wonders why their increasingly shrill and desperate “message” is not being acted upon…d’uh. If there ever was something significant in the CO2/global warming disaster story, it’s been long buried in the pile of supposed scientific excrement heaped on top.
Once again skeptics, applying well established scientific principals dating back to Darwin, are proven correct.
Climate alarmists are once again proven wrong.
Back in 2010, when Willis published on this topic, I didn’t have the sense that he was claiming priority. It was a fascinating essay, but it seemed that he was pulling together information from pre-existing sources. In fact, I remember seeing a nature documentary on PBS examining the role of parrot fish in building up coral atolls, within the last couple of years. In any case, admittedly not having read the Kench article, I hope that he fully acknowledges prior discoveries, including Willis’, if appropriate.
The dominant long-term (millions of years) control on the growth of coral atolls is isostatic sinking of ocean volcanic seamounts. Submarine volcanoes that build up to the sea surface and become dormant cannot be maintained at that level due to the thin (10 km) oceanic crust supporting them and, hence, begin to subside. Corals colonizing the edge of the volcanic seamounts can maintain growth to compensate for the subsidence, as evidenced by drill records in the Pacific of many hundreds of meters of coral lying above volcanic basement. These thick piles of coral are not just related to the Holocene sea-level rise of 130 meters.
During the Holocene, a sea-level rise of 100 meters between 14,000 and 7,000 years ago (1.43 m/century) still was not able to overwhelm the capacity of corals to maintain their growth and survive.
As for every other coast line in the world there is this little process called sedimentation that fills accommodation space. Our current “unprecedented” sea level rise wouldn’t even show up in the geological record as a eustatic rise in sea level, it would be considered aggradational.
In late February, 1961 I went by ship, to ; excuse me, that’s through, the Tuamotu Archipelago; often referred to as the “””…LOW….””” Archipelago, in French Polynesia. I was going from Wellington NZ to Manhattan NY. You get from NZ, to NY, by simply switching the position of the Y and Z keys on your keyboard; and just by co-incidence, the French do that, on their keyboards; nobody knows why.
The gazillion islands of the LOW Archipelago, lie just to the East of the Society Islands; better known as Tahiti.
Tokelau Islands are in Kiwi Polynesia, well West of Tahiti.
No NZ, doesn’t “own” that part of Polynesia, which includes the Cook Islands, and Raratonga; they just provide “support” for a group of peoples, with less than critical mass for the modern world.
Of course they were quite able to keep their heads above sea level, before Captain Cook discovered them, circa 1769.
Tahiti, and Moorea are mountainous islands; unlike the Tuamotu. We actually steamed right through the Tuamotu, without seeing anything; they are so low, you wouldn’t know they are there.
How embarrassing to learn that my alma mater actually has a professor, who doesn’t know how coral atolls work.
What are the chances that he thinks that coral atolls all lie in the ” Goldilocks zone” between the bottom of the ocean, and the top of Mt Everest. (we don’t own that either; just climb it.).
So Tokelau, and the Tuamotu, just got lucky and present sea level just happens to lie at their altitude.
I wonder where the Tuamotu were 50 million years ago, when the south pole was as warm as Florida, and California; were they still at sea level back then ??
I’ve talked with Dr. Chris de Freitas, and you can bet he knows how Atolls work.
I didn’t know UofA had a school of Environment; de Freitas used to be in the Geography department.
Evidently, this dumb editor, is smart enough to know there is NO letter (s) in the Polynesian language(s) , so it red lines it, if you write Tuamotus . Plural(s) are the same as singular.
Well what an amazing Atollic revelation from New Zealand for Earth Day
Atolls are just like river deltas. They always occur and are maintained at sea level. It’s obvious to normal folk and it’s what I was taught at school.
Taking a toll on the alarmists.
Here is an issue of concern. Do note the last paragraph of the post just above the link to the 2010/01/27 article. Ancient ways of living on such islands resulted in the upward rise of the society along with the coral. Modern buildings and structures, such as roads, do not elevate in the same dynamic manner. The yearly mm. changes in sea level means this could be a slowly evolving issue for developed atolls. In this context, “resilient to sea level changes” may have to have an expanded meaning.
Well the sea level rise cat’s trophy has quickly been switched to Florida, now that Tokelau crashed and burned.
My AT&T yoohoo e-mail news just put up a sea level rise omen for Florida. News gets around fast.
“Atolls exist in a delicate balance”
Delicate ?!?!
I believe I posted here some years ago about a paper I read in the journal Quaternary Research of research done on some atolls in the Pacific and how the coral responds to rising sea levels. These particular atolls are just barely above the surface of the ocean today and are in an area of very stable crust (crust is not rising nor is it subsiding). They were able to determine by studying the coral skeletons that sea levels during the Holocene Optimum were about 2 meters higher than today. I can’t right now put my finger on the paper but there are several similar ones. For example:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gea.3340090202/full
And this one is very interesting as it goes into the impact of the Little Ice Age on the Pacific:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2007.tb00277.x/abstract
coral atolls are safe for another reason: sea level rise has stopped.
There has been no sea level rise this century, according to the Galveston sea level data. This data is conclusive, because the Texas coast is characterized by subsidence, as it has been for the whole of the Tertiary as a result of sediment loading (the sediments here are over 30,000 feet on top of the Jurassic basment).
For those who are puzzled, I shall spell it out: Gradual subsidence is the eternal and unchanging feature of the Texas coast. This is sufficient to give a measured sea level rise over time, although this would be apparent only, not actual.
Because of the subsidence, it is possible that actual sea level has risen this century. However, I know of no way to factor subsidence, which must be immeasureable.
The present rate of sea level rise given by such places as the U of Colorado is entirely fabricated, according to this data (posted online by the NOAA)
This is the form that that great unwinding will take I hope. Plenty more “new evidence” which will really be just all the eidence that was previously ignored. Hopefully we can look forward to “New evidence suggests natural cycles dominate earth’s climate” etc. etc.
In the lexicon of alarmism coral atolls are to sea level rise as Polar bears are to sea ice reduction: doomed, doomed, doomed.
Its funny how most people can’t believe that land can sink, as an Example New Orleans, and some parts of Houston.
Good news for the people of The Maldives – but maybe not so good for their politicians…