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Surrendering to the sea by choice

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 904–905 (2019)Cite this article

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Moving whole communities away from the coastline sounds like a remote possibility. But as sea levels rise, relocation might be an increasingly inevitable, though challenging, option.

The coastal villages of Isle de Jean Charles in southern Louisiana and Newtok in western Alaska don’t seem to have a lot in common on the surface. They are some 5,000 miles apart: one with a semitropical climate bordering the Gulf of Mexico; the other covered with ice and closer to Russia than to the mainland United States. But facing the similar threat of vanishing under rising seas, both have made the same decision — packing up everything and starting over on new ground. Sitting at either end of the country, Louisiana and Alaska stand at ground zero of climate change, their coastlines disappearing at an alarming clip as greenhouse gas emissions disrupt weather patterns and drive up sea level. But the hundreds of settlements lining the shorelines of these two states aren’t the only ones to which a changing and unsettled climate will pose an existential threat in the coming decades.

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  1. Freelance journalist, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Marcello Rossi

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  1. Marcello Rossi
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Correspondence to Marcello Rossi.

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Rossi, M. Surrendering to the sea by choice. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 904–905 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0655-x

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