Scubaism

The Chicago Tribune has the interesting story of Alex Retraubun, a man who works for the Indonesian marine and fisheries ministry. He is on a mission to visit and survey each and every one of 17,504 islands and determine the names of all of them. He and his team started two years ago jumping on a fishing boat every two weeks and motored their way from island to island, province by province.

On each two-week trip, Retraubun and his staff visit at least 100 islands and sometimes as many as 400. After canoeing ashore, they walk all the way around each island, find the high-tide mark — sandbars that are submerged at high tide don’t count as islands — and try to track down some locals to determine the name, if any.

In a nation with thousands of islands just a foot or two above sea level, up to 2,000 islands could vanish within 30 years if the region’s seas rise as predicted, he says. “If that happens, I’ll know exactly which islands have disappeared and which have not,” Retraubun says, “because we’ll have the data.”