A class 5 hurricane that sweep through Hawaii earlier this calendar month appears to have wiped an intact island off the map .
Hurricane Walaka made its way through Hawaii in other October , induce havoc on its path through the Pacific . It has since been downgraded to a family 4 , and is continuing to trundle on , one ofmany large stormsthis year .
In its wake , however , it seems to have cause an island to disappear . Called East Island , it was located in an atoll do it as the French Frigate Shoals , 885 kilometers ( 550 international mile ) from Honolulu .
Measuring just 4.5 hectares ( 11 Akka ) , the spitting of guts – only half a mile long – was not big by most criterion . But it was the second largest island in the atoll , play host to a US Coast Guard station until 1952 and it was also a central nesting footing for threatened green sea turtles and nursery for monk cachet .
" About 96 percent [ of Hawaiian green sea turtles ] use the atoll and about half of them used this island , " Professor Chip Fletcher from the University of Hawaii ’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology toldABC News .
The departure of the island was particularly afflictive for Fletcher . It ’s mean to have existed for up to 2,000 year . But he and his colleague had only started study it in earnest in July this year .
“ I verbalise a swear word . I had a holy moo-cow consequence , jolly in incredulity that it had disappear , ” he toldThe Guardian . “ The island was in all probability one to two thousand years older and we were only there in July , so for it to be lost mightily now is fairly bad chance . ”
lagger footage of the island hold by Fletcher and his colleague sooner this twelvemonth .
East Island ’s disappearance spotlight the fragility of small islands like this in the face of mounting climate alteration . Sea level rise are expected to claimmoreandmoreas clock time rifle on , with this beinga glimpseof what ’s to issue forth .
“ We ’re going to see a lot of these write up in the years ahead , and everyone will be so sorry , ” conservationist Bill McKibben wrote onTwitter .
There is a chance that the island could reemerge in the future , noted theHonolulu Civil Beat . But it would take meter to revegetate and become unchanging , while the return of nearby corals could take years . If ever we demand an example of the encroachment of mood change , this is it .
