A study warns that rising sea levels could submerge Easter Island's iconic moai statues by 2080, threatening the island's cultural identity and tourism economy.
Researchers used advanced models to predict flooding impacts on cultural assets, highlighting the urgency for community planning.
Coastal flooding, caused by rising sea levels, could drown out the iconic moai statues on Chile’s Easter Island by 2080, a new study has warned.
This would not only wipe out a key aspect of the islanders’ cultural identity but also endanger their economic security, as the statues are the backbone of the island’s tourism industry, the authors have said.
Easter Island is located in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Together with Hawaii and New Zealand, it forms the so-called ‘Polynesian Triangle’, a spearhead-shaped area in the Pacific that is the traditional homeland of the Polynesian people.
The Easter Island statues are monolithic human figures carved from volcanic rock by the first Polynesian settlers on the island, the Rapa Nui people. They carved them in the likeness of their ancestors.
The statues are found mostly on the island’s perimeter, placed on stone platforms called ahu. They were likely erected between 1250 and 1500 CE.
In 1995, the Rapa Nui National Park was listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
Noah Paoa, lead author of the study and doctoral student in the Department of Earth Sciences in the University of Hawaii Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and his team built a detailed digital twin of the study site and used advanced computer models to simulate the wave environment along the coastline.
“They then mapped the projected flooding caused by waves under future sea level rise scenarios. The flood extent was then overlaid on geospatial layers containing the location of cultural assets provided to the team by local partners, which allowed the researchers to identify the cultural assets that will be flooded,” a statement by the University noted.
They found that by 2080, seasonal waves will reach Ahu Tongariki, the iconic ceremonial platform that is part of the Rapa Nui National Park. “This coastal flooding also threatens 51 cultural assets in the area, including Rapa Nui’s world-renowned moai statues,” according to the statement.
“Unfortunately, from a scientific standpoint, the findings are not surprising,” the statement quoted Paoa. “We know that sea level rise poses a direct threat to coastlines globally. The critical question was not if the site would be impacted, but how soon and how severely. Our work aimed to set potential timelines by which we could expect the impacts to happen. Finding that waves could reach Ahu Tongariki by 2080 provides the specific, urgent data needed to incentivize community discussion and planning for the future.”
The findings have been published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.