Un-Discovered Islands

The first island to disappear is barely land at all.

My fourteen-year-old daughter discovers the clickbait one evening: They Look For This Island, But What They Find Instead Will Blow Your Mind.

I peek over her shoulder as she narrates; apparently, a research vessel on its way to New Zealand noticed Midge Island, a speck of reef, was not where the map said it should be, was, in fact, nowhere at all.

My husband scoffs. Don't read that garbage. He is splayed across the loveseat, laptop on his thighs. He continues. This kind of thing used to happen when people drew maps by hand, and these tiny sandbars or whale corpses or kelp rafts, they kept being copied forward because nobody questioned it.

I google Midge Island.

My daughter scrolls on. Her voice holds a wave, a minor tremble, when she speaks. It's gone, though. That's what it says. Midge Island just disappeared.

That doesn't sound real, kiddo.

Mom, were you tracking it?

My graduate students and I chart islands impacted by climate change, the rate of erosion for each coastline, estimating the amount of time before they are devoured by the sea.

I've never heard of it.

Don't encourage this, says my husband. He swivels, catches his laptop before it falls. Islands don't just disappear.

I zoom in on a satellite map, expecting a grain of sand in a rolling blue Pacific eye. But there's only empty ocean, a patch of skin from which a scar has faded or a birthmark has been removed.

My daughter plants herself further back into the couch cushion, tapping at her phone. She has always chosen words carefully, scientifically. When she was younger she saw a spider once, hesitated before stomping it out. She said, I was terrified. No, petrified.

She asks, so it's happened before?

Sailors used to get confused in the 1800s, my husband says. Drunk. And sometimes they saw things that weren't there.

My daughter looks so young in this moment. I want to promise her it's nothing to worry about, that Midge Island has never existed so it couldn't disappear.

It's nothing, says my husband.

But a thought is resting, a gritty thought, too impossible to speak, a foreboding like being alone in a darkened street.

In the morning, my daughter's face is all rocky shore, all treacherous reef and sweeping tide. My husband asks how she is and all she says is, fine, barely looking up from her unfinished geometry homework. I have coffee with a colleague about a book we are coauthoring and my husband forgets his lunch and I do not think of Midge Island again. Its most recognizable quality is that it is no longer here.

________

Kiribati vanishes one week later, a periwinkle and golden paradise, a flower petal archipelago strung across the sea.

We were tracking this one, I tell my husband. Kiribati is number one on internet lists of Top Ten Most Beautiful Remote Islands and 10 Gorgeous Islands You Need To Visit ASAP Before Climate Change Destroys Them.

So it was erosion, he says, leaning over my shoulder, hard plastic of his glasses against my temple.

Not this quickly.

I was interviewed once for a well-known science podcast, a live show, alongside a climatologist from Kiribati, a woman who answered questions in front of an audience with more ease than I ever can. I spoke about ocean levels, the ways in which we are always being eroded, and the scientist from Kiribati described the situation for her country, its atolls always under siege, each tide rising higher than the last.

The male host nodded as we spoke, interrupting and questioning and scooping the ends of our sentences under the beginnings of his own, our thoughts and words becoming only sand swept out to sea. He did it while the other woman was discussing her peoples' likely future evacuation, started to ask what could be done, but she cut him off.

She said, we won't let ourselves be eroded. You can't disappear us.

My...