Then we had water, all the time.

Isle de Jean Charles & its waters, time-lapse 2013 to 2018. Rotated clockwise (north points to the right) & in false color (near infrared, blue, coastal blue) to better contrast vegetation and land (red, gray/white) from water (green, blue, black). Landsat-8 data courtesy of US Geological Survey.

A 2014 short film on Isle de Jean Charles by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at Global Oneness Project

Levees stopped the natural flow of fresh water and sediment that reinforced the fragile marshes. Oil and gas companies dredged through the mud to lay pipelines and build canals, carving paths for saltwater to intrude and kill the freshwater vegetation that held the land together. The unstoppable, glacial momentum of sea-level rise has only made things worse. Today, almost nothing remains of what was very recently a vast expanse of bountiful marshes and swampland.

Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw band of Native Americans, has lost 98 percent of its land since 1955. Its 99 remaining residents have been dubbed “America’s first climate refugees.”

…

The residents of Isle de Jean Charles won’t be alone in their exodus. There will be up to 13 million climate refugees in the United States by the end of this century. Even if humanity were to stop all carbon emissions today, at least 414 towns, villages, and cities across the country would face relocation, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, researchers predict that the number will exceed 1,000.

And this isn’t a distant threat. At least 17 communities, most of which are Native American or Native Alaskan, are already in the process of climate-related relocations. Yet despite its inevitability, there is no official framework to handle this displacement. There is no U.S. government agency, process, or funding dedicated to confronting this impending humanitarian crisis.

Only one climate-related relocation is currently funded and administered by the government: the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project.

- “How to Save a Town From Rising Waters” [Michael Isaac Stein at CityLab]

Learn more at:

• https://vimeo.com/ondemand/cantstopthewater
• http://www.coastalresettlement.org/
• https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/10/climate-refugees-trump-hud/

License, Sources, and Technical Notes:

• Animated GIF at top licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
• Landsat-8 bands combination: 5 (near infrared), 2 (blue), 1 (coastal blue)
• Source GeoTiff files from Google Cloud Public Datasets:
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20131218_20170307_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20140409_20170307_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20141119_20170302_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20150207_20170301_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20150919_20170225_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20160210_20170224_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20160226_20170224_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20160313_20170224_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20161210_20170219_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20171026_20171107_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20171127_20171206_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_022040_20180114_20180120_01_T1’,
• Made in Python with Jupyter notebooks, sat-utils, geojson.io, rasterio, ezgif.com