The Journal of Cultural Heritage has published a new study indicating that rising sea levels could push powerful seasonal waves into Easter Island’s 15 iconic moai statues, in the latest potential peril to cultural heritage from climate change.

“Sea level rise is real,” said Noah Paoa, lead author of the study published on Wednesday and a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “It’s not a distant threat.”

About 50 other cultural sites in the area are also at risk from flooding.

Paoa, who is from Easter Island – a Chilean territory and volcanic island in Polynesia known to its Indigenous people as Rapa Nui – and his colleagues built a high-resolution “digital twin” of the island’s eastern coastline and ran computer models

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