Chip Fletcher at UH is one of the most well known experts studying sea level rise in Hawaii along with NOAA. He told me five years ago that the beach at Tunnels will be gone within ten years! He was right but it is happening now five years early.
I have taken video of Tunnels underwater and above for over ten years and I know the area well. Tunnels is a sunken volcano and is filled with insane lava tubes. You can even dive into a lava tube at 40 feet deep, filled with sleeping reef sharks right under the beach where people are walking! The corals at Tunnels are almost all dead. Check out this pic I took out of my HD video a few years ago with all the beautiful corals. The next pic shows the corals have died and are covered in disease. Anyone who has ever dove at Tunnels knows what I am talking about.
Dead coral means more giant waves crashing on the beach! The corals cause a drag on the underside of the waves causing them to break on the reef and disperse thousands of pounds of energy. When the corals die the giant waves break closer to shore and rip the sand off the beach. With rising sea levels and loss of our reefs the damage to coastal homes will increase. Just look at Rocky Point in Oahu and Tunnels Beach on Kauai is close behind!
Our beach sand is make in part by ground up coral. Once we kill our coral reefs there is not more material to make our beaches. 3 million dollar homes are still being build right on the beach in Kauai. These home will loose their yards and roads within a few short years. The houses are up on stilts so they will survive for a long time, but unless they have the ability to fly a helicopter to get to their house, they are in big time trouble.
People are so blind that they will spend millions of dollars building fancy homes on the beach, river banks and wetlands that will fall into the sea within our life times! If these people would just fund more high tech reef studies and spend their money paying attention to the computer models on the NOAA web page we would all be fine, but humans are just not smart enough to look into the future like the rest of the critters do here in Kauai!
The pics attached are of the vanishing beach at Tunnels, the before and after reef pics and huge waves that tear apart the beaches due to rising sea levels and dying reefs.