A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 , 2019
chipelago rose an average of
about 4.3 millimeters per year.
Since 2000, that rate has been
closer to 7 millimeters, or more
than a quarter of an inch per year,
said Marie, the geography profes-
sor. That trend is expected to
continue.
While the numbers seem small
and the data covers only a limited
period, the change could result in
multiple feet of sea level rise by
century’s end.
For more than a decade, re-
searchers have maintained a net-
work of more than 1,100 coastal
monitoring stations around the
islands’ perimeter, which paint a
portrait of how erosion is altering
the shoreline. While some spots
are relatively stable, others have
steadily receded year after year.
Severe storms have claimed as
much as 55 feet of shoreline all at
once.
The Post relied on data from
Berkeley Earth, an independent
group that analyzes temperature
data, for its findings about how
the islands have already warmed
more than 2 degrees Celsius — a
threshold world leaders have
pledged not to allow the globe to
surpass.
Canadian researchers, who
drew on air temperature records
dating to 1873, have documented
a similar change. Researcher Pe-
ter Galbraith and colleagues
found the region has warmed
about 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 de-
grees Fahrenheit).
Milder winters and longer
summers have kept the tourists
coming — some 80,000 trekked
here last year to wind surf, bike
and bird-watch — many arriving
on a ferry that now runs year-
round.
But the islands’ fragility has
brought them a sort of grim noto-
riety. Time magazine put the
Magdalen Islands on its list of “
amazing places to visit before
they vanish.” Architectural Digest
included them on its “30 places to
visit before they’re gone forever.”
Madelinots, as locals call them-
selves, have no intention of van-
ishing anytime soon. But re-
searchers estimate that without
serious action, hundreds of struc-
tures and miles of roads could fall
victim to erosion and flooding in
coming decades.
“We can try adaptation. We
must try it,” Marie said. “But the
solutions could be very expen-
sive.”‘Not everything can be saved’
At 17, Bourgeois left his native
islands to study in Montreal.
Eventually, like many Madelinots,
he felt the pull of home.
When he began his career, the
idea that climate change would
seriously threaten the islands
seemed a stretch. Now, he spends
his days worrying about how to
protect infrastructure from crum-
bling cliffs, eroding dunes and
rising seas.
“It wasn’t part of the job de-lish seafarers, who are no stranger
to the risks posed by nature.
Inside a small, century-old
church in Old Harry, hundreds of
black-and-white portraits hang in
tribute to those lost at sea over the
decades.
The Acadian refugees who col-
onized the archipelago in the lat-
ter half of the 18th century
brought with them their unique
strain of French and their Catho-
lic faith. Other residents, includ-
ing the islands’ minority English-
speaking community, trace their
roots to the survivors of ship-
wrecks that claimed vessels off
these shores in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
The land they occupy is an
Edward Hopper landscape come
to life. Brightly colored houses dot
rolling green hills. Lighthouses
cling to jagged sandstone cliffs.
Massive sand dunes guard salt
marshes and serene lagoons, and
unspoiled beaches stretch for
miles.
But as the sea ice that tradition-
ally protected these islands
shrinks, the sea that surrounds
them is swelling.
Between 1964 and 2013, the
waters along the coast of the ar-scientist at the center, said the
loss of sea ice leaves the islands
exposed and ripe for erosion. “The
presence of ice acts like a cover on
the ocean that dampens the waves
of winter storms,” he said.
A number of harrowing storms
have clobbered the islands in re-
cent years, including last Novem-
ber, when 75 mph winds and mas-
sive waves knocked out power
and communication with main-
land Quebec. Sections of the main
road were damaged and sand
dunes obliterated. The Canadian
military flew in workers to help
restore power and check on resi-
dents.
Isabelle Cormier, 42, who re-
turned last year from Australia to
raise her children on her native
islands, said that storm left many
people particularly rattled.
“This is home, and hopefully it
will be here for a while. But I don’t
know, it’s going quick,” said Corm-
ier, who saw her family’s small
beach cottage inundated after a
towering dune that had shielded
it for decades washed away in
hours. “To witness it in one life-
time, it’s shocking.”
The islands have long been
home to hardy French and Eng-‘It used to be all ice’
They remember the ice.
The fishermen, the mayor, the
101-year-old woman in her hilltop
house built with wood from an old
shipwreck — all of them describe
the mystical look the frozen gulf
once had in winter and the feeling
of utter isolation from the rest of
the world.
“It used to be all ice, as far as the
eye could see.... You’d look out,
and all you could see was white.
Now you look out, and it’s just the
ocean,” said Geraldine Burke, now- “The changes I’ve seen in the
last 10 years have been astound-
ing.”
“My grandfather said he could
remember when there was one
winter with no ice,” said Serge
Bourgeois, 53, the planning direc-
tor for the municipality of Iles-de-
la-Madeleine. Now, if ice materi-
alizes at all around the islands in
winter, “it is exceptional.”
While year-to-year variability
exists, the amount of sea ice that
blankets the Gulf of St. Lawrence
is shrinking at a rate of roughly
12 percent per decade, according
to data from the National Snow
and Ice Data Center.
Walt Meier, a senior research
ster from the gulf, reveling in
historic catches. But when Cyr
ventured roughly 50 feet down, he
saw that the seafloor remained
full of lobsters, almost as if the
fishing had yet to begin.
“It’s not normal,” he said one
morning inside Bistro Plongée Al-
pha, the restaurant he owns on
the northern tip of the islands.
Like baffled clammers in Uru-
guay and the struggling lobster
industry off the fast-warming
coast of Rhode Island, islanders
here are anxious about the shift-
ing sea. The deep waters of the
gulf also have warmed more than
2 degrees Celsius over the past
century, scientists have found,
raising concerns about the fisher-
ies that power the economy in
communities around coastal Que-
bec.
As residents witness the chang-
es, they worry their children and
grandchildren will inherit a far
different place than the one they
have always known. And as the
growing problems threaten fra-
gile infrastructure, local officials
spend their days figuring out how
to try to hold back the encroach-
ing sea — and where to simply
surrender to it.storm, it is becoming clearer that
the sea, which has always sus-
tained these islands, is now their
greatest threat.
A Washington Post examina-
tion of the fastest-warming places
around the world has found that
the Magdalen Islands, as they are
known in English, have warmed
2.3 degrees Celsius (4.2 degrees
Fahrenheit) since the late 19th
century, twice the global average.
As in New England, Siberia and
other global hot spots at higher
latitudes, winters here are heat-
ing up even more quickly, eclips-
ing 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees
Fahrenheit). That change has
fueled freezing and thawing cy-
cles here that wreak havoc on the
famous — and famously fragile —
sandstone cliffs.
The sea ice that used to encase
the islands most winters, shield-
ing them from the brunt of fierce
storms and pounding waves, is
shrinking at a rate of about
555 square miles annually, data
shows. That’s a swath of ice larger
than Los Angeles.
Even as that natural defense
collapses, sea levels have been
rising at a rate roughly twice the
global norm in recent years, re-
searchers say.
The result is an escalating bat-
tle against erosion and flooding —
one that a growing number of
coastal populations face, from is-
lands in the South Pacific to com-
munities along the U.S. East
Coast.
In the Magdalen Islands, the
consequences are unmistakable:
Some parts of the shoreline have
lost as much as 14 feet per year to
the sea over the past decade. Key
roads face perpetual risk of wash-
ing out. The hospital and the city
hall sit alarmingly close to deteri-
orating cliffs. Rising waters
threaten to contaminate aquifers
used for drinking water. And each
year, the sea inches closer to more
homes and businesses.
Guillaume Marie, a geography
professor at the University of Que-
bec at Rimouski, has studied
coastal hazards around Quebec
for years. He said the islands’
inhabitants are pioneers of a sort,
as they wrestle with the daily
challenges posed by climate
change.
“In Quebec, it’s clearly the most
vulnerable place,” he said. “They
are the first ones who are facing
these kinds of problems.”
Even the good news is worri-
some, as Mario Cyr, a Magdalen
Islands native and renowned un-
derwater cinematographer, dis-
covered last summer.
Cyr, who has crisscrossed the
world from the Arctic to Antarcti-
ca to film nature documentaries,
was astounded by what he found
when he went diving in the Gulf of
St. Lawrence.
It was the end of the annual
lobster season. Fishing crews had
hauled millions of pounds of lob-
CANADA FROM A
Officials wrestle with how to fight the sea, when to surrender
Source: Berkeley Earth HARRY STEVENS/THE WASHINGTON POSTTemperature change, 2014-
compared with 1889-001.2.2ºC3.6ºF 10.8+-1 6+-1.Insufficient dataMagdalen IslandsMagdalen IslandsMagdalen IslandsMagdalen IslandsC
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DABONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POSTMassive erosion claims a safety line near a home on the Magdalen Islands. Warming winters have fueled freezing and thawing cycles that wreak havoc on the fragile sandstone cliffs.