Can islands flip over

But land loss can also take place in far more momentous ways. Ivey Burden is describing an extreme case of land disappearing: sinkholes. She describes the recipe for this phenomenon: First, the soil must be enriched with carbonate minerals like limestone or sandstone. Then, add in enough flowing groundwater to the mix, and those minerals start to dissolve.

Dissolve enough and they collapse, swallowing whatever was above them into the earth. Thankfully, she says, occurrences of sudden, gaping chasms are relatively uncommon, as sinkholes are more likely to form gradually. Luckily, in these sinkhole-prone areas, efforts to monitor soil chemistry and use satellites to scope out at-risk zones by Ivey Burden and other engineers can help predict future sinkage.

Worst of all, because earthquakes are hard to predict, liquefaction is almost impossible to prepare for. But fortunately, because liquefaction requires such specific conditions, it's rare and tends to occur only after quakes in tremblor-prone places like California and New Zealand.

Of course, most of the land loss we see today is by more ubiquitous, less flashy mechanisms. One of the most subtle—but also most substantial over long stretches of time and space—is called subsidence , the slow and steady sinking of land over thousands of years.

To explain why, we have to first transport ourselves 20, years ago, to a time when the Laurentide Ice Sheet extended from the North Pole, covering Canada and much what would become present day New England. This ice sheet was, unsurprisingly, quite heavy. It compressed the land it covered, causing the viscous crust to squish slowly out the other end and elevate the land along the coastal Mid-Atlantic in an attempt to reach equilibrium.

After the Laurentide melted, that once-elevated land began slowly sinking again, like a seesaw over geological timescales.

Today, that land is still sinking by about a millimeter per year. This process of subsidence is why part of the Mid-Atlantic is being lost to the ocean. Fact Checks. Guam Reaches the Tipping Point? During a House committee meeting, Rep. Hank Johnson said he feared that stationing 8, Marines on Guam would cause the island to "become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.

True About this rating. Top Fact Checks. View all. Willard paused and replied, "We don't anticipate that. The blog Left Coast Rebel said , "Call it a new low, a new 'tipping point' - even in the halls of Congress, if you will. According to the Hill, a spokesman for Johnson responded to the incident by saying the congressman is concerned the influx of military personnel will overwhelm the island's infrastructure and ecosystem.

The United States plans to move thousands of Marines and their families, about 8, people in all, to the small island of Guam, which has a current population of about , To prepare for the military buildup, the government is constructing new facilities on the island like an additional Marine base and a new airfield. At the peak of construction, Guam's population would increase by 79, people, or about 45 percent, the Washington Post reported.