Hawaii Is Sinking Back into the Ocean; Now What?
The history of Hawaii, from a geological standpoint, is one of augmentation. Over a million years ago, thanks to some well-placed tectonic plates, and volcanic activity, the islands today known as Hawaii rose from the depths of the ocean, eventually becoming home to early Polynesian settlers, and later becoming America's 50th state. Oh yeah, and a couple decades down the line, surfing's mecca, too.
But now, according to a new study from the University of Hawaii, the islands are sinking back into the ocean. And in some places, it's happening a lot quicker than previously estimated.
'Our findings highlight that subsidence is a major, yet often overlooked, factor in assessments of future flood exposure,' said Kyle Murray, lead author of the study and researcher with the Climate Resilience Collaborative (CRC) at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). 'In rapidly subsiding areas, sea level rise impacts will be felt much sooner than previously estimated, which means that we must prepare for flooding on a shorter timeline.'
According to the research behind the study, they found that the average rate sinking on Oahu is fairly low at 0.6 millimeters per year – about the thickness of your standard sheet of printer paper. However, in certain areas, the subsidence levels are much higher…40 times higher. They found that some regions of Oahu are exceeding 40 millimeters per year, shocking the scientists.'This rate of land subsidence is faster than the long-term rate of sea level rise in Hawai'i (1.54 millimeters per year since 1905), which means those areas will experience chronic flooding sooner than anticipated,' said Phil Thompson, study co-author and director of the UH Sea Level Center in SOEST. 'In places like the Mapunapuna industrial region, subsidence could increase flood exposure area by over 50% by 2050, while compressing flood preparedness timelines by up to 50 years.'
So, what to do? Well, for now, the data can help urban planners, and residents, prepare for the future.
'Our research provides critical data that can inform state and county decision-making, helping to improve flood exposure assessments, infrastructure resilience, and long-term urban planning,' said Chip Fletcher, co-author, director of CRC, and interim dean of SOEST. 'This work directly serves the people of Hawai'i by ensuring that local adaptation strategies are based on the best available science, ultimately helping to protect homes, businesses, and cultural areas.'
A million years from now, will future humans (if we still exist) speak about Hawaii like the lost city of Atlantis? Let's hope not.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Tagomics awarded £860k grant for colorectal cancer diagnostic
Tagomics has been awarded £860,000 ($1.1m) from Innovate UK to develop a test for diagnosing early-stage colorectal cancer (CRC). The Cambridge, UK-based company said the money from the UK government innovation agency's Biomedical Catalyst programme would help fund a £1.2m project that is applying its Interlace multiomics workflow platform towards the detection of genetic and epigenetic mutations associated with CRC. This includes the development of new models for analysing patients' multiomic profiles to identify new disease biomarkers. Once the project concludes, a pilot study of the diagnostic test will be undertaken with the UK National Health Service (NHS). Led by Dr Arash Assadsangabi, consultant physician and gastroenterologist at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, in collaboration with the Northern Care Alliance Research Collection biobank, the study will profile 250 patients suspected of having CRC to validate identified biomarkers and demonstrate multiomic profiling's efficacy in the early detection of the disease. Tagomics' chief scientific officer and co-founder, Dr Robert Neely said: 'We believe that the unique, information-rich dataset that Interlace provides us will be pivotal in detecting CRC at the earliest possible stages of development, enabling treatment of the cancer when it is most vulnerable to modern therapeutics, with the aim of dramatically improving patient outcomes.' Upon completion of the project, Tagomics will look to further expand the capabilities and applications of its Interlace platform with the support of Agilent Technologies, building on an established partnership that was key to the early development of the platform, Dr Neely added. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 107,320 new cases of colon cancer and 46,950 new cases of rectal cancer in 2025. According to GlobalData analysis, with early detection of CRC critical in reducing the disease's mortality rate, in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests have a critical role to play in bridging the disease's screening gap, with company's such as Guardant Health at work on developing patient-first tests to create solutions that make patient care more accessible. Guardant's SHIELD test, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a primary screening option for CRC in 2024, is intended to detect alterations in the blood associated with CRC. "Tagomics awarded £860k grant for colorectal cancer diagnostic" was originally created and published by Medical Device Network, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
These cosmic monsters are creating the biggest explosions since the big bang
The vast emptiness of space is growing emptier one star at a time. That's because 80 billion lightyears from Earth, three cosmic beasts are devouring stars ten times the size of the sun. In a new study by the University of Hawaii, among others, astronomers scouring through NASA and European Space Agency's data said they had discovered three supermassive black holes. Those behemoths feast on stars of such a size that make the one at the center of the solar system look like a light snack. The explosions those scientists have recorded, which happened when those black holes shredded and sucked up the fabric of those stars, are the largest since the big bang that created the universe. 'What I think is so exciting about this work is that we're pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,' Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the study, said in the NASA article. Black holes are astronomical objects invisible to the human eye. They have a gravitational pull so strong that they swallow everything, including light. A supermassive black hole is the biggest of all black holes, sitting at the center of galaxies like the one at the heart of the Milky Way slowly sucking planets and all other matter toward it. When a star gets trapped in the pull of a supermassive black hole, it can disintegrate with a spectacular explosion in a cosmic event that scientists in a new study published this week in the journal Science Advances call 'extreme nuclear transient.' 'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' University of Hawaii graduate student Jason Hinkle said in a separate NASA article. Hinkle is the lead author of the new study that describes for the first time two such events that took place over the past decade. Two of the three supermassive black holes were detected in 2016 and 2018 by an ESA mission and are documented for the first time in the study. The third, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was identified in 2020 by a Caltech observatory in California and subsequently documented in 2023. The blasts are so powerful that the only cosmic event larger in magnitude has been the big bang that sparked the dawn of the universe. Unlike in other stellar explosions, though, the way X-ray, optical light and ultraviolet rays dimmed and brightened in these incidents made it clear this event was a 'black hole ripping a star apart,' the NASA article said. NASA says black holes actually brighten during these cosmic events and that brightness lasts for several months. That brightness has given scientists a new way to find more black holes in the early distant universe. When astronomers peer into space, they are looking back in time because the further away they look, the older the light is reaching them — the light reaching Earth from the sun, for example, is eight minutes old. 'We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,' Payne said. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Black holes caught devouring massive stars in biggest explosion since Big Bang
Supermassive black holes lurk all throughout the known universe, but catching one in the act of devouring its cosmic dinner doesn't happen all that often. In fact, unless a black hole is actively in the middle of eating gas, dust or massive stars, the ominous entities remain invisible to us. It's when black holes emerge out of hiding to feast on their prey and some type of matter is sucked into their celestial maw that they begin to glow brightly. And recently, a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii may have seen more than they anticipated. Using both space and ground-based data, the researchers uncovered black hole events so packed with energy, they said they represented the biggest explosions since the Big Bang. The three examples the team highlighted in a new study describe supermassive black holes feasting on stars more than three times as massive as our own sun. The events, dubbed 'extreme nuclear transients,' are not only more rare than a supernova star explosion, but are more powerful than 100 supernovae combined, the team claimed. Here's what to know about how the powerful forces may have shaped galaxies and how the discovery may help astronomers better study black holes. Supermassive black holes, regions of space where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light doesn't have enough energy to escape, are often considered terrors of the known universe. When any object gets close to a supermassive black hole, it's typically ensnared in a powerful gravitational pull. That's due to the event horizon – a theoretical boundary known as the "point of no return" where light and other radiation can no longer escape. As their name implies, supermassive black holes are enormous (Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our Milky Way, is 4.3 million times bigger than the sun.) They're also scarily destructive and perplexing sources of enigma for astronomers who have long sought to learn more about entities that humans can't really get anywhere near. Black holes: NASA finds supermassive black hole it calls 'Space Jaws' Each of the supermassive black holes the researchers described lies at the center of a distant galaxy. And each were observed to have suddenly brightened for several months after shredding up a star three to 10 times heavier than our sun – unleashing enormous amounts of radiations across their host galaxies. The scientists involved in the new study described these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called 'extreme nuclear transients.' One of the transient events the astronomers looked at released 25 times more energy than the most powerful supernova on record ‒ radiating in one year the amount of energy equal to the lifetime output of 100 of our suns. Since just 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients are a different way to find black holes across vast cosmic distances, which in astronomy means peering back in time, Benjamin Shappee, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who co-authored the study, said in a statement. 'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii who led the new study, added in a statement. The new discovery was announced not long after NASA's famed Hubble Space Telescope helped uncover another covert black hole that had long eluded detection. That supermassive black hole was so menacing that NASA even dubbed it in a blog post as "space jaws" – a reference to Steven Spielberg's famous 1975 shark film. "Space jaws" revealed itself to astronomers earlier in 2025 with a spectacular burst of radiation known as a tidal disruption event that was so large and so bright that several NASA instruments were able to detect it 600 million light-years from Earth. In the University of Hawaii's study, researchers examined three black holes discovered within the last decade. One of the star-destroying events, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in California. The other two black holes were first detected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018. Data from a number of spacecraft and ground-based observatories helped the team confirm their findings. Though the team concluded the events to be rare, the extreme brightness they produced means they can be seen even in extremely distant galaxies. Astronomers who took part in the study say looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil more supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet. The team's findings were published Wednesday, June 4, in the journal Science Advances. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Black holes spotted devouring stars in most explosive event ever seen
