Saving the island would involve such heroic government effort and spending that it is difficult to imagine it happening. What could be done about the island’s inundation? Are Tangier watermen doing anything about it, or expecting that anything could be done about it? The lead author of a 2015 study of the island’s dilemma reckons that if unchecked, the island will be uninhabitable within twenty-five years. Today, high tides not only climb the island’s edges, but percolate up through the ground in Tangier’s middle. This land loss has accelerated over time while islanders ascribe the cause to wind-driven waves, the acceleration suggests that rising seas are exacerbating the erosive effects of those waves, and in fact the relative sea-level rise in the lower Chesapeake is among the highest on Earth. Tangier has lost two-thirds of its area, or more than eight acres per year, and it wasn’t big to begin with.

Since the mid-19 th century, however, the very water that sustains them has been stealing the ground from under their feet. It was settled during the American Revolution, and is home today to roughly 460 descendants of those early settlers-who, like their forebears, earn their keep by crabbing and oystering in small boats.

Tangier is a speck of mud and marsh in the middle of the bay’s widest point, a dozen miles from the nearest mainland port. We spoke to him afterwards.Ĭan you describe Tangier Island and what is happening to it as the climate changes? Earl Swift talked to us about Tangier Island, an island in the Chesapeake Bay that is the focus of his newest book “ Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island,” see picture above from Earl Swift. The third speaker on the panel was Earl Swift, a Virginia-based journalist and prolific author of hundreds of articles and seven books, who has been a Residential Fellow at the University of Virginia. Ellen Gilinsky, who has had a long career in environmental policy (including at Environmental Protection Agency), pointed towards the water quality challenges more generally under the current administration, and how some states, including Virginia, are trying to step in where federal policies are retreating. runoff from agricultural fields as well as storm water from cities) made for the high variance in nitrogen and phosphorus levels, even when the trend in the overall levels was encouraging for the Chesapeake Bay. UVA’s own Larry Band emphasized how extreme weather events that trigger non-point source pollution (i.e. As part of this year’s World Water Events (6th edition), the Global Water Initiative organized a panel on the Chesapeake Bay and how it has been affected by climate change.

What does high variance mean high bays