If the sea level rises high enough, it will sink us all. But the first casualties of melting glaciers will likely be island nations. The opening of Stephen Leahy’s Vice article “The Nations Guaranteed to Be Swallowed By the Sea“:

“Imagine the street you live on is knee-deep in floodwater, and it’s ruining everything in sight, including your home. Now imagine that those awful floodwaters never, ever recede. Instead, the water just keeps rising and rising until your entire country drowns.

For a number of island nations, that’s ultimately the significance of the recent reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, along with hundreds of glaciers.

‘We’ve already lost some island atolls. On others the rising sea is destroying homes, washing away coffins and skeletons from graves,’ Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, told me. ‘Now with every full moon the high tides brings salt water into our streets. We’re moving further inland but can’t move much further.’

The Marshall Islands are located in the northern Pacific Ocean, and are home to some 70,000 people spread out over 24 low-lying coral atolls. Low-lying, as in six feet above sea level on average. Not only do rising seas flood and erode shorelines, they also make groundwater too salty too drink and ‘poison’ the land with salt so crops and even coconuts trees can’t grow.“