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Title: The Quest To Build Islands With Ocean Currents In the Maldives

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/21/2056...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier
Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and
explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place. Off one atoll, just
south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to
capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and
protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the
En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure
made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part
of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of
parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two
meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater
images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface
of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish
beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a
ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an
architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the
project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena. The
Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to
transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural
forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets
of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with
water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack
furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017,
the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different
materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and
mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and
aims to overcome their biggest limitation. In the Maldives, the direction of
the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to
capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the
year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-
round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon
season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area,"
Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the
archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters
to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral
reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form
of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as
concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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