"The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish/Low-lying tropical island nations were expected to be early victims of rising seas."

"But research tells a surprising story: Many islands are stable. Some have even grown."

The NYT reports. That's a free-access link, my last of the month. There are many details and diagrams — and beautiful photographs — at the link. It's a complicated phenomenon, so please try to understand it (and don't just guess that the seas are not rising!).

[W]hen the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety.... Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.... 

The seas had risen an inch or so each decade, yet the waves had kept piling sediment on the islands’ shores, enough to mean that most of them hadn’t changed much in size. Their position on the reef might have shifted. Their shape might be different. Whatever was going on, it clearly wasn’t as simple as oceans rise, islands wash away....