Surf's Up - Way Up

Of all places, this one is supposed to be permanent: The white tombstones directly face the balmy Central Pacific, coconut palms in the foreground wave in the trade winds, and the turquoise surf breaks on the reefs in the distance.

But it's the wind and surf that are slowly attacking this burial ground and everything around it. Storms, rogue waves, and unusually high tides overcome the concrete sea walls with increasing frequency, eroding the plots and strewing corrugated metal, plastic netting, and other flotsam over headstones.

In fact, the sea is attacking virtually the entire coastline of the Republic of the Marshall Islands - a sobering prospect for its 60,000 people because the country is nothing but coastline.

It consists of some 1,225 islets clustered into 29 delicate coral atolls, strewn across 750,000 square miles of the Central Pacific. Most of the islands are only five or six feet above sea level and only a few hundred yards wide. Add all the dry land together and the Marshall Islands aren't much bigger than the District of Columbia.

Scientists predict that as polar glaciers melt, and gradually warming sea water expands in volume, the world's sea level will rise by 1 to 3 feet over the next century. Some say that "greenhouse-gas" emissions from cars, power plants, and industry may be to blame. While industrialized countries ponder the evidence and potential damage in coastal areas, low-lying island nations like the Marshalls worry that their countries will be rendered uninhabitable by rising seas and associated changes in weather patterns.

"Sea-level rise is something so horrible here that people just don't want to think about it, especially since there's nothing they can do to stop it," says Jorelik Tibon, general manager of the national environmental protection agency. "We're seeing so much erosion that people are building sea walls everywhere, but that won't keep the sea out if the predicted rise occurs."

Island nations at risk

Coral atolls are extremely vulnerable: Their islands are low, flat, sandy-soil places resembling oversized sandbars. All of the countries likely to be rendered uninhabitable if predicted sea-level rises occur are made up entirely of such atolls. In addition to the Marshalls, they include Kiribati and Tuvalu in the Pacific, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Large parts of Tonga, Palau, Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia - all Pacific island nations - would also be lost, as would densely populated flood plains in Bangladesh, Egypt, China, and other mainland countries.

"Sea-level rise is an immediate problem, which needs to be dealt with now," says Espen Ronnenberg of the Marshallese mission to the UN, who represented threatened island countries at last year's climate-change summit in Kyoto, Japan. "We always seem to get the reaction from the US that this is something we can put off, study, and see how it goes. We don't really have that luxury."

Small island states in the Pacific report that they are already experiencing the effects of accelerated sea-level rise, such as increased erosion, seawater-tainted water supplies, and property damage. The leaders of Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Niue, and the Cook Islands issued a joint communique prior to last year's Kyoto meeting declaring sea-level rise a fact of daily life in their countries, and the most serious threat to Pacific nations.

The Marshalls and French Polynesia supported the statement. Another atoll nation, the Maldives, has joined Pacific nations in loudly calling for developed countries to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions.

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