Pacific Dataviz Challenge 2026 · Climate change
“The Pacific is sinking” is one sentence stretched over thousands of islands that are doing opposite things. Twenty-five years of satellite shoreline measurements say that in Choiseul five islands vanished completely — while in the Carterets, whose people are being evacuated, the shoreline is gaining land. Land area and habitability are not the same measurement.
Every dot is one measurement transect at its true position — together they draw the coastline. The lines behind them are the mapped shoreline in each year, oldest pale to newest dark. Drag the year, or press play, to watch the record fill in.
Median rate of shoreline change per site. Right of zero is gaining land, left is losing it. Click a bar to load that island above.
Sea level is rising at every one of these sites and the ocean is warmer at all of them. That forcing is regional and near-uniform — the spread is 3.8 to 5.4 millimetres a year. The shoreline response is not: it runs from −0.17 to +0.44 metres a year, and it is not predicted by how fast the sea is rising (Pearson r = +0.13, p = 0.74). Rows are in the same order in both charts — if sea level set the outcome, the right-hand chart would echo the left.
With nine sites this comparison can rule out a strong relationship, not a weak one.
Sea level and sea-surface temperature: Pacific Data Hub .Stat,
DF_CLIMATE_CHANGE (SEA_LVL, SST_ANOM), both on the Challenge’s official
dataset list. Warming is the 2014–2023 mean against a 1951–1980 baseline.
The grey bar is the full range each shoreline swept across 25 years. The dot is where it actually finished. Movement is large everywhere and the net result is small — Kayangel swept almost 41 metres to end half a metre from where it began. These coasts are not still; they are churning in place.
Every figure in this piece. Click a row to load that island above.