Easter Island is eroding
Remains of famous civilization at risk of disappearing as climate change leads to rising water levels
HANGA ROA, EASTER ISLAND— The human bones lay baking in the sun. It wasn’t the first time Hetereki Huke had stumbled upon an open grave like this one.
For years, the swelling waves had broken open platform after platform containing ancient remains. Inside the tombs were old obsidian spearheads, pieces of cremated bone and, sometimes, parts of the haunting statues that have made this island famous.
But this time was different for Huke. The crumbling site was where generations of his own ancestors had been buried.
“Those bones were related to my family,” said Huke, an architect, recalling that day last year.
Centuries ago, Easter Island’s civilization collapsed, but the statues left behind here are a reminder of how powerful it must have been. And now, many of the remains of that civilization may be erased, the United Nations warns, by the rising sea levels rapidly eroding Easter Island’s coasts.
Many of the moai statues and nearly all of the ahu, the platforms that in many cases also serve as tombs for the dead, ring the island. With some climate models predicting that sea levels will rise by 1.5 to 1.8 metres by 2100, residents and scientists fear that storms and waves now pose a threat like never before.
“You feel an impotency in this, to not be able to protect the bones of your own ancestors,” said Camilo Rapu, the head of Ma’u Henua, the Indigenous organization that controls Rapa Nui National Park, which covers most of the island, and its archeological sites. “It hurts immensely.”
Similar fates are faced by islanders throughout the Pacific Ocean and along its margins, in places like the tiny Marshall Islands that are disappearing under the sea and in the sinking megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia, where streets become rivers after storms hit. Kiribati, a republic of coral atolls north of Fiji, may be uninhabitable in a generation. Residents may become refugees.
On Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name of Easter Island, much of which has been recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site, both the future and the past are threatened.
The island’s economy hangs in the balance. The archeological sites are the backbone of the main industry: tourism. Last year, this island with only 6,000 residents attracted more than 100,000 visitors. Easter Island’s hotels, restaurants and tour businesses take in more than $70 million (U.S.) every year.
Tourists usually begin their days in Tongariki, where they gather to watch the sunrise from behind a line of monoliths facing inland. Groups split off to Anakena, the island’s one sandy beach, or to the ancient plat- forms at Akahanga, a sprawling site of former villages on the shore where, tradition holds, the island’s mythical founder, Hotu Matu’a, is buried in a stone grave.
Yet all three sites now stand to be eroded by rising waters, scientists say.
“We don’t want people seeing these places through old photos,” Rapu said.
The highway circuit that runs through much of the triangular island shows a landscape that is changing.
The damage has been swift on Ovahe Beach, near where Huke came across bones in the sun. For generations, there had been a sandy beach that was popular with tourists and locals. Nearby, a number of unmarked burial sites were covered with stones.
Now the waves have carried off almost all of the sand, leaving jagged volcanic stone. The burial sites have been damaged and it’s not clear how long they will survive the waves.
“I once swam in Ovahe and the sand seemed to go on for miles,” said Pedro Pablo Edmunds, the Hanga Roa mayor, in his office as he flipped through a coffee table book with images of the beach. “Now, it’s all stone.”
Two years ago, officials buried a time capsule, to be opened by islanders in 2066, near the town hall. Among the items in- side were pictures of Ovahe Beach before it lost all its sand.
“They will dig it up in 50 years and see us standing there, where there is no beach,” Edmunds said.
At a site called Ura Uranga Te Mahina on the island’s southern coast, park officials were alarmed last year when blocks of a stone wall perched about three metres above a rocky coast collapsed after being battered by waves.
“Now, all of this will fall next,” said Rafael Rapu Rapu, the chief archeologist of Ma’u Henua, pointing to a map showing the platforms behind the collapsed wall.
Rapu has used a nearby site, called Runga Va’e, to experiment with measures to mitigate the damage. Using part of a $400,000 grant from the Japanese government, officials built a seawall for protection against the waves. But it remains unclear whether the wall will be enough to stop the erosion, or if the island leaders will have to consider moving platforms and statues away from the coast in order to save them. “Can we take them somewhere else?” said Rapu. “Yes, but you lose their context, you lose their history when doing that.”
Rapu, who grew up on the island, said he regretted the environmental changes that had be- fallen the area. Few birds nest on Motu Nui anymore, he said, a consequence of what he suspects is changing weather patterns. He looked over the water and recalled his father’s stories of big migrations that used to arrive at the island regularly.
Sebastian Paoa, the head of planning at Ma’u Henua, said he was sure that ultimately the island’s inhabitants would find their way through the challenge of the rising sea levels, just as they had survived the collapse in ancient times.
“They knew their environment was coming apart, but that didn’t stop them from persisting here,” he said. “It’s the same with climate change today.”
Huke, the architect, feels the same way.
Finding the bones of his ancestors on the beach wasn’t cause for despair, he said, but a call to action. In recent months, he’s been gathering information for a climate change assessment to be presented to officials, tallying everything from erosion to the groundwater supply.
“Islands like us are always the first to face climate change,” he said. “We have been here 1,000 years. We have gotten through things like this. The world isn’t ending. And believe me, we’ve suffered through an ecological disaster before.”