Disappearing islands

At the time, the best available data, from an Australian tidal monitoring system with instruments strategically placed around the Pacific, including on Funafuti, showed the sea around the atoll had risen about 7cm over the past 13 years. While seas in the Pacific don't rise like water in a bath, so that Arctic and Antarctic ice melts don't necessarily cause sea level rises around places like Tuvalu, other factors, such as rising surface temperatures, and longer and more persistent El Nino events, contribute to creeping sea level rise.

The extreme February high tides are nothing new. Last year's record occurred as a new moon was closest to the earth for 16 years, pushing tides hard against Tuvalu's nine inhabited atolls. But sea level rise caused by global warming amplifies the impacts of the annual extreme tides.

The eastern, barren, scoured Pacific Ocean side of Funafuti Atoll is really weird. Locals don't go out there much, and neither do I when I'm “on island”. There's this deeply spooky feeling that the roiling ocean's out to get the atoll, battering it, nibbling at it, seeping underneath and then up through it, and when there's a storm surge or a tsunami from a cyclone or deep sea tremor far away, smashing into and over it, deeply frightening the 4,500 or so Tuvaluans crammed on the three square kilometre land area of the atoll.

The traditional staple food crop in Tuvalu, their version of potatoes, is a large swamp taro called Pulaka, which is grown in deep mulched pits dug into the atolls. Pulaka growing secrets are passed from father to son. Each year, they have Pulaka growing competitions, which are reported on Radio Tuvalu like fearsome sporting competitions.

The size of the winning Pulaka is extraordinary, as long as a metre or more and tens of kilos in weight.

But on Funafuti Atoll, thanks to sea water seepage underneath the atoll through cracks caused by World War II excavations and the building of the first air strip, the Pulaka is dying, and with it are important Tuvaluan traditions.

It's deeply saddening to stand with worried Elders looking at the Pulaka's elephantine green leaves tinged with yellow, a sure sign the Pulaka beneath the flooded pits is sick and even dying. Global warming hasn't caused this tragedy, but it certainly amplifies the sea water seepage which is poisoning the atolls from beneath.

Sitting with Elders in a Tuvaluan Fale (open sided, thatch roofed hut) is another way to learn about the effects of global warming there.

They tell how fish migrations have changed, and how the changes disrupt island traditions for catching and sharing different species from the catches. Coconut, pandanus, and breadfruit harvests aren't as bountiful. The winds, sea currents, and bird migrations seem wrong, not what they were in their ancestor's time.

The rains aren't coming like they used to, the Elders say. But when it does rain, the storms, walls of black cloud rising from the horizon, with bone and building rattling thunder and lightening cracks, often literally pour thick rain on to the atoll, also to cause widespread flooding because, with a saturated water table, the lens shaped reservoir beneath the atoll, there's nowhere for the fresh water to go but outwards. As it later seeps into the atoll, it turns into poison, mixing with contaminated brackish water also polluted from islander's septic tanks, useless, even dangerous, to use on local's gardens.

In between the storms, they get fresh water from tanks everywhere on the atoll, but when these run dry in an El Nino amplified drought, a hideously expensive desalination plant produces fresh water which is trucked around the 12km-long atoll so householders don't suffer thirst, at least children can be bathed, and toilets occasionally used.

Tuvaluans are a devoutly Christian people, and quite a few Elders believe God's promise in Genesis 9 to never again flood the Earth. Following an afternoon storm, a glorious rainbow can arc across the sky to the west, bracketing the Motu (islets) on the far western edge of Te Namo (the lagoon) some 18km away, reaffirming, at least for the more devout, that God's promise is still strong. All this talk about global warming and sea level rise threatening Tuvalu's very existence is just Palagi (white person, outsider) stuff.