High Tides And Hype

In October 1942 American military forces landed on Funafuti—a strategic location to base its fight against the Japanese advance in the Pacific region. Local people sacrificed their pulaka gardens rather than their villages for construction of the military runway. The deep organic mud pits had to be filled and so coral and sand was ‘borrowed’ from the then unpopulated part of the islet. The land was never restored. Sixty years on, people are forced to live on and around four hectares of tidal pools that are littered with the detritus of modern life where parents find it hard to stop children playing. [All Photos On This Page Are By JOCELYN CARLIN]

Te Namo (the lagoon) is placid, approaching extreme low tide, with its rocky, slippery eastern shore against the atoll exposed, then giving way to light green then deeper blue water. On the horizon to the west, small motu (islets) are visible, tiny slivers of bright pinkish and white coral sand beaches graduating to dense green vegetation caps. One of these is a barren, brown, ocean battered rock, perhaps a mute, and saddening warning about what could occur if the global warming projections turn out to be right.

A few locals are lazing in the shallows, or trying their luck at fishing using small white nets to trawl a few deeper pools close to the shore.

The weather for the last two days has been identical, with Monday afternoon mildly interrupted by a few showers and a blustery wind from the north-west.

Outside the meteorological office on Funafuti atoll at high tide on 28 February 2006.

The most extreme high tide for 15 years is predicted to hit here about 5.30 pm, on paper about 3.26 meters. The highest place on Funafuti Atoll is about 3.7 meters above mean high tide. The Met Office people are confident the tide this afternoon will exceed 3.4 meters. A month ago, similar extreme high tides exceeded the paper projections as well.

The tides started building on Sunday afternoon. At church that morning, pastors had asked their flocks to pray for continuing good weather, and to trust in God to protect them. The government's disaster people were prepared to respond, as was the Red Cross, and the church was ready to assist too.

Girls from Fetuvalu High School wander home at the end of the day passing by a point on the lagoon side of the atoll where the water laps over the road at high tide.

If I believed a lot of overseas reporting about Funafuti and Tuvalu generally, the atoll should be populated with dread-filled Tuvaluans huddled in their homes eyeing off the nearest coconut palm up which they'd scuttle when their atolls are flooded from end to end. Yet all I've seen over the last 10 days have been Tuvaluans on Funafuti Atoll going about their everyday activities: going to work or school, shopping at one of the co-operatively owned supermarkets, tooling around on pushbikes, motorbikes or cars, playing late afternoon sport on the airstrip, fishing, tending to their gardens, tending the pens, killing and cooking pigs.

It is everyday Funafuti life, pretty much low-stress, perhaps very lightly worry-tinged if you press them in conversation, and certainly not sodden with dread or paralyzed by fear. If I further believed some extreme environmental propaganda about Tuvalu, the place should be in imminent danger of irrevocably sinking beneath the rising seas.

Boys take advantage of the abnormally high tide to play with their toy boats in salty flood waters that have risen through the ground.

Thanks to improved Internet access, locals and visitors can now easily access the same news and information as most other Net users, so many read the story on ABC Online about heavily scientifically-hedged Australian Pacific sea level research showing the sea around Tuvalu had risen, cumulatively, about seven centimetres, over the 13 years that detailed measurements have been taken.

Late on Saturday morning, I'd stopped by the port complex on North Funafuti to photograph the tidal monitor machine from whence this data had been collected, caged in its protective metal frame and looking like a somewhat grotty refrigerator with a couple of antennas and wind catchers at its top. This thing, for scientific purposes, is Funafuti Ground Zero, and its data, and weather data from the Met Office is fed into the calculations and simulations used to study global warming, from whence come the very tentative, but improving, projections suggesting Tuvalu is doomed to be swamped within a generation.

Sisters Litia and Allaineta Homasi do their school homework on a Sunday afternoon while relaxing under the coconut and pandanus trees on the ocean side of the atoll.

There is no doubt global warming is doing noticeable damage to Funafuti's environment. In most respects it is amplifying the damage already done, most seriously starting in late 1942 when American Army engineers basically shattered the atoll to build the first air strip, blasted deeper shipping channels, and built wharves and piers which interrupted the sand bearing currents in Te Namo, which replenished the beaches. Several large water, and now rubbish filled pits were dug around Funafuti, called "borrow pits," because locals were assured the military were only "borrowing" the sand and rocks. They are now surrounded by houses, shacks, fales and pig pens, and are accurately described as slums.

Setting to one side human assaults on the environment such as Funafuti's severe, unhealthy and unsightly solid waste problem and a polluted water table, global warming insidiously erodes natural protective barriers to storms, surges and extreme tides, such as reefs and beaches.

Either it was the prayers of churchgoers on Sunday, February 26-and not a few devout Tuvaluans would believe so--or it was a persistent convergence zone high above the country which caused the consistently benign weather when the tides were at their peak.

The first born of the first born has his first birthday and the event is greatly celebrated. Head of the family and Tuvalu’s first Prime Minister, Sir Toaripi Lauti holds young Taimitasi Sogivalu as his mother places the freshly made fou on his head.

This did not stop the massive pressure on the atoll from rising seas which forced water against the shores, pushed by a rising new moon on February 28. This water then had nowhere to go but up through cracks in the shattered atoll because there was almost no wind to force the water over it.

So on Sunday afternoon, I found myself walking, then wading into the bizarre scene of hot, salty water oozing and bubbling its way up through the atoll to rapidly flood swathes of low lying land around the air strip, including the Met Office and power station's front yards. The same scene was repeated for the next three days.

Yet locals see and experience this seepage flooding every time the tidal conditions are extreme. At one location, several houses were flooded and residents had to be evacuated. At only one small spot on the Monday afternoon, and at the southern end of the atoll on Tuesday, did Te Namo break through its low barrier to flood small areas of the atoll.

The incessantly rolling Pacific Ocean to the east was frustrated in its attempts to cause mischief from its side of the atoll.

The whole situation on Funafuti Atoll at the end of February had almost nothing to do with global warming and sea level rise. What happened early that week was the equivalent of a sharp and nasty storm flooding well-known flood spots, while leaving the rest of the atoll untouched and intact. In the middle of Funafuti at the height of the tides, it was a typical late afternoon and evening. A few poor households were evacuated, nuisance flooding was experienced elsewhere, but it was certainly not a case of global warming-caused sea level rise flooding Funafuti Atoll from end to end and terrifying the locals.

A roadside vendor sells freshly-caught tuna every evening.

The late afternoon tropical storm, which suddenly blew in from the north west on March 3, actually caused more local flooding than the earlier extreme high tides, if only because the massive deluge from above had nowhere to go in a water table already saturated by sea water seepage earlier in the week.

As it was, on February 28 a persistent high altitude convergence zone kept the weather clement when it really mattered, or the power of prayer saw God's benevolence bestowed on devout and trusting Tuvalu. Take your pick.

Perhaps, in a sense, that's a really "good news" story for the people of Funafuti Atoll and Tuvalu. Until the next extreme high tide season.