Over the next months, on weekends and after high school classes, Wu pulled up a bean bag chair beside his father's desk, and the pair worked side-by-side to finish their paper explaining the pace at which data suggests seawater will saturate the island. Wu's computer screen last spring said otherwise. In 2017, after CNN aired a segment that noted Tangier Island's support of Trump, the president himself phoned Eskridge to tell him not to worry about sea level rise and that the town would last for hundreds more years. And Schulte felt that people misunderstood the cause of Tangier's problems - that accelerating sea level rise is to blame. The paper stirred media interest but no commitment from policymakers to save the town. The 2015 study said the land mass was on pace to be lost in the next 50 years. Schulte, a marine scientist based in Norfolk, Virginia, had published a paper in 2015 in Scientific Reports predicting Tangier might soon need to be abandoned. Last spring, when Zehao Wu, now 18, brought his computer into the family living room to show off the results of the project he'd been fiddling with for weeks, his dad "jumped out of his chair."įor years, Schulte, Wu's father, had been talking about Tangier Island around the dinner table, often venting frustration at how little action had been taken to help communities like it. It was much larger than I thought I knew at that time," Schulte said. "A lot of towns and cities are going to have similar estimates, and I have no idea where we're going to get that money." 'Not sold'ĭata analysis of satellite mapping showed that Tangier Island had lost nearly 62 percent of its upland area since 1967. Army Corps of Engineers and one of the paper's two authors. "What people are going to start realizing quickly, dealing with climate change is going to be an extremely expensive undertaking," said Dave Schulte, a scientist for the U.S. No federal agency has the authority to lead national assistance on climate migration efforts, a 2020 Government Accountability Office report said. Millions of Americans could be forced to move from flood-prone areas by the year 2100, according to the 2018 U.S. The quick timeline and steep costs for relocating a single small town illustrate the challenges the United States faces as sea levels rise and flooding increasingly threatens coastal communities. The new study, published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Climate, estimates that it would cost about $150 million to relocate the town of Tangier's residents and as much as $350 million to bulk up the island and protect its shoreline.
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