Floating Island- Is it Real?

In February 16^th, 2018 College of Charleston arranged a very interesting event where a promising science fiction writer, Dr. Melody, gave her speech on floating islands. She is currently an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. She said that although she was not an architect, she was struck by some pictures of floating islands in an article in “The Guardian,” and later, as a scholar of literature, she did some research on her own. She thought maybe those floating islands can solve the problems some pacific islands are facing due to global warming.

At the beginning of her presentation, she mentioned that several movies such as “Water World, China Mieville, Snow Crash, [and] 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” were based on the concept of floating lands in post-flood worlds. However, the acceleration of sea level rise now requires the floating island to be taken out of the realm of science fiction. Small island states like Torres Strait Island, the Seychelles, Tuvalu, Micronesia, and the Maldives are considering many options to respond to a post flood future. She showed us a video that actually struck us about how vulnerable those island nations are. In the video clip the president of the Maldives said, “It’s not something in the future, we are facing right now… people were living here for thousands of years but ability sustain human life here seems to be very fragile”. The president Nasid also said, “if we cannot stop the global warming and sea level rising, as the president, it is clear to me that the most important to me to fight for our survival. In the video it showed how flat is the Maldives; there is no hill. The capital Malé has walls around it, but it is still very vulnerable to the rising seas.

Because of the increasing coastal erosion and sea level rising in the near future, perhaps the citizens of these threatened islands will be climate refugees. President Nashid has arranged climate activity forums (COP 21 conferences) and intragovernmental lowland organizations that are now advocating to reduce carbon emission to slow global warming to reduce the speed of this dangerous rise in sea level. If reducing carbon emissions does not work, the people of the Maldives and other island nations will be forced to evacuate to higher lands and become climate refugees. Dr. Melody said that the World Bank has recently come up with a structured migration program suggesting that people of these sinking lowlands can be transferred to the highlands of Austrailia and New Zealand. Some people of the archipelago of Micronesia and Fiji have already invested money to develop the legal framework to assist in climate refugee relocation.

Recently, another option has emerged, large international architecture firms such as Water Studio from the Netherlands and the Sea Studying Institute in Silicon Valley alongside various others in Japan, France, and the rest of the globe have been designing futuristic floating islands that could potentially be sold to the endangered small island nations. Most of these designs are periodically featured in newspaper like in “The Guardian” or the New York Times. These floating island structures could provide new and safer habitation.  In one interview with the President of Kiribati, he said that he has already had meetings with architects who designed some of the spectacles in Dubai with their artificial islands, and he thinks that building floating islands is a potential solution to save their nation, although it is not possible to accommodate every person. Now we can only wait. Perhaps floating islands will not simply remain in the dreams of science fiction writers as scientists and architects are working together to make these islands become real and efficient to save human lives.