By the end of the century, rising sea levels could push powerful seasonal waves into Easter Island’s 15 iconic moai statues, according to a new study published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. About 50 other cultural sites in the area are also at risk from flooding.

“Sea level rise is real,” said Noah Paoa, lead author of the study 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.”

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Paoa, who is from Easter Island — 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 to simulate future wave impacts under various sea

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