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The climate disaster is affecting every place on Earth,
but it’s not affecting everywhere in the same way, or to the same extent.
Among the most vulnerable places are those susceptible to the rising seas.
That might bring to mind great cities like Miami or Venice,
but it’s also true of tiny communities like Tangier Island,
in America’s Chesapeake Bay.
And the cost to save even small villages
like the one on Tangier Island should raise alarm bells
about the overall impact of this climate disaster,
according to a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Climate.
In it, two researchers estimated
it could cost more than a quarter of a billion US dollars to save just a few hundred homes.
And policymakers will have to decide soon about what to do,
because in just 30 years, the island will not be habitable at all.
Today, Tangier is home to around four hundred permanent residents,
and it’s said to be the only remaining island fishing community in Virginia.
The island’s remaining habitable land has an elevation less than one meter above the high tide.
That solid ground is broken into three chunks,
which the paper somewhat optimistically calls “ridges.”
Between the ridges are even lower-lying wetlands,
crisscrossed by the roads that connect the ridges.
This precarious situation is made worse by the fact that the Chesapeake Bay
is experiencing sea-level rise at an unusually high rate
around one centimeter every two years.
Using historical satellite images, the researchers determined that since 1967,
the island has lost 62% of its habitable area.
Saltwater is so close to the surface that trees cannot survive.
Two of the island’s three remaining ridges will
likely become wetlands by 2035,
while the last hangs on for another fifteen years.
The study investigates two possible responses to this situation:
raising the island or evacuating its population.
Saving the island would require several key actions.
First is reinforcing the existing shoreline to stop further erosion.
Next, covering the remaining habitable land with sand to raise it by several meters.
Of course, since this area is covered in existing buildings,
those buildings would have to be raised up and then placed on the new ground.
Finally, the town’s infrastructure, such as roads, plumbing,
and powerlines will need to be relocated to ensure that they stay above the rising water table.
In total, the authors estimate that these actions could cost between 250 and 350 million dollars.
That is a lot of money, and a cost that could not be borne by the community alone.
Those other option, of course, is to basically give up on Tangier Island
and help the remaining residents relocate to a new area.
But that wouldn’t be cheap, either.
Based on the real-world costs already paid to relocate similar communities,
the researchers estimate that the government would need to spend 100 to 200 million dollars.
That’s up to half a million dollars per citizen.
And, unfortunately, Tangier Island is not alone.
A 2019 study estimated that, worldwide,
230 million people live on land that is less than a meter above sea level.
Each community and geography comes with its own unique challenges,
so we can’t just scale up the estimates from Tangier.
But they’re probably not that big of an outlier, either.
And many at-risk communities are low-income,
indigenous, minority, or generally unable to bear the costs.
There’s no easy answer here, but it’s a reminder that,
when it comes to fighting the climate crisis, doing nothing comes with costs of its own.
So how about we turn to some more warm-fuzzy news.
A paper published October 28th in the journal Scientific Reports helps corroborate
the idea that one of the Ice Age’s most fearsome predators
was capable of looking out for others of its kind.
The study focuses on Smilodon, better known as the saber-toothed cat.
Smilodon was an apex predator during the Pleistocene,
which spanned 2.6 million years ago to just 10,000 BCE. ~
Understanding social behavior in extinct animals has long been a challenge,
especially for species without living relatives.
After all, our social inclinations depend on more than just our bones.
But, in this case, the state of the animal’s bones
was a pretty big tipoff.
The specimen in question is a Smilodon pelvis
retrieved from California’s La Brea Tar Pits almost a hundred years ago.
The right hip socket on this particular bone is badly damaged,
which paleontologists have long assumed was the cause of its death.
But this new study suggests otherwise.
The researchers took the bone and placed it in a CT scanner.
And that revealed evidence that this creature was suffering from hip dysplasia,
a condition common in modern day cats and dogs.
In hip dysplasia, the hip’s socket doesn’t fully form,
allowing the ball of the thigh bone to slip out and dislocate.
The key here is that dysplasia is something an animal is born with.
It would have made it almost impossible for this creature to hunt for itself,
yet the size of its bones and the way they’re fused indicate this animal reached adulthood.
And the researchers say that is the clue that points to social behavior.
Other saber-tooths would have had to protect it, feed it, and stay with it
exactly the sorts of behavior found in social animals.
What’s more, this doesn’t seem to have been a one-off situation:
at least three other pelvises found at La Brea show possible evidence of dysplasia.
Other evidence has suggested that Smilodon young may have been cared for by their mothers
for an unusually long time, which could also help explain these results.
In any case, it’s another example of the unique approach paleontologists
have to take when exploring life’s ancient past.
And it’s neat to discover our surprising similarities with creatures
that could not seem more different.
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