Any child who has spent a morning building sand castles only to watch the afternoon tide destroy them in minutes knows that the ocean always wins.

Yet coastal protection strategies have traditionally focused on battling the sea – trying to hold back the tides and combat waves and currents by armoring coastlines with jetties and seawalls and bringing sand from the ocean floor to ‘renewable’ beaches. These approaches are temporary solutions, but eventually the sea reabsorbs the dredged sand, intense surf breaches the sea wall and jetties can push erosion onto a neighboring beach. The ocean wins.

With climate change accelerating sea level rise and coastal erosion, the need for better solutions is urgent. A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes that eight of the world’s ten largest cities are near a coast, points to record high global sea levels by 2023 and warns that high tide flooding is now 300 to 900 percent more common then now. was 50 years ago, threatening homes, businesses, roads and bridges, and a range of public infrastructure from water supplies to power plants.

Island states face these threats more acutely than other countries, and there is a critical need for better solutions. MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab is refining an innovative lab that demonstrates the value of letting nature take its course—with a little human persuasion.

The Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean with nearly 1,200 islands, has traditionally relied on land reclamation via dredging to replenish eroding coastlines. In collaboration with Maldivian climate technology company Invena Private Limited, the Self-Assembly Lab aims to develop technological solutions for coastal erosion that mimic nature by harnessing ocean currents to collect sand. The Growing Islands project creates and implements underwater structures that take advantage of wave energy to promote the accumulation of sand in strategic locations – expanding islands and rebuilding coastlines in sustainable ways that can eventually be scaled up to coastal areas around the world.

“There is room for a new perspective on climate adaptation, one that builds with nature and uses data for fair decision-making,” says Sarah Dole, co-founder and CEO of Invena.

MIT’s groundbreaking work was the subject of multiple presentations at the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week in late September in New York City. During the week, Skylar Tibbits, co-founder and director of Self-Assembly Lab, and Thoriq Ibrahim, Minister of Climate Change, Environment and Energy of the Maldives, also presented the findings of the Growing Islands project at MIT Solve’s Global Challenge Finals in New York.

“An interesting story is emerging around island dynamics,” says Tibbits, whose UN-sponsored panel (“Adaptation Through Innovation: How the Private Sector Could Lead the Way”) was co-hosted by the Maldives government and the US . Agency for International Development, a Growing Islands project financier.

In a recent interview, Tibbits said that islands are “almost lifelike in their features. They can adapt and grow and change and fluctuate.” Despite some predictions that the Maldives could be swamped by sea level rise and ravaged by erosion, “these islands may be more resilient than we thought. And perhaps we can learn much more from these natural sand formations… perhaps they are a better model for how we adapt to sea level rise, erosion and climate change in the future than our man-made cities.”

Building on a series of laboratory experiments that began in 2017, the MIT Self-Assembly Lab and Invena have been testing the effectiveness of underwater structures to expand islands and rebuild coastlines in the Maldivian capital Male since 2019. Since then, researchers have tightened the experiments. based on initial results demonstrating the promise of using underwater bladders and other structures to harness natural currents to promote strategic accumulation of sand.

The work is “groundbreaking,” said Alex Moen, principal investigator at the National Geographic Society, an early backer of the project.

“Skylar and his team’s innovative technology reflects the kind of progressive, solutions-oriented approaches needed to address the growing threats of sea level rise and erosion to island nations and coastal regions,” said Moen.

Most recently, in August 2024, the team submerged a 60-by-60-meter structure in a lagoon near Male. The structure is six times larger than its predecessor, which was installed in 2019, Tibbits said. Although the 2019 island-building experiment was a success, ocean currents in the Maldives change seasonally and sand could only accumulate in one season.

“The idea of ​​this was to make it omnidirectional. We wanted to make it work all year round. In any direction, in any season, we should collect sand in the same area,” says Tibbits. “This is our largest experiment yet, and I think it has the best chance of collecting the most amount of sand, so we’re super excited about that.”

The next experiment will not focus on building islands, but on combating beach erosion. This project, which will be installed later this fall, is intended to not only expand a beach, but also provide recreational benefits for local residents and improve habitat for marine life such as fish and corals.

“This will be the first large-scale installation intentionally designed for marine habitats,” says Tibbits.

Another important aspect of the Growing Islands project is taking place in Tibbits’ lab at MIT, where researchers are improving the ability to predict and monitor changes on low-lying islands through analysis of satellite images – a technique that promises to facilitate which is now a labor-intensive process. intensive process involving land and sea research by drones and researchers on foot and at sea.

“In the future we could monitor and predict coastlines all over the world – every island, every coastline around the world,” says Tibbits. “Are these islands getting smaller and bigger? How quickly are they losing ground? No one really knows unless we do it now by doing physical research, and that doesn’t scale. We think we have a solution for that.”

Hopefully, there will also soon be financial support for a Mobile Ocean Innovation Lab, a ‘floating hub’ that would provide small island developing states with cutting-edge technologies to promote coastal and climate resilience, nature conservation and renewable energy. Ultimately, Tibbits says, this would allow the team to “travel anywhere in the world and work with local communities, local innovators, artists and scientists to help develop and deploy some of these technologies in better ways.”

Expanding the reach of climate change solutions that work with natural forces, rather than resist them, depends on getting more people, organizations and governments involved.

“There are two challenges,” says Tibbits. “One is the legacy and history of what people have done in the past, which limits what we think we can do in the future. We have been building hard infrastructure on our coasts for centuries, so we have a lot of knowledge about that. We have companies, practices, and expertise, and we have a built-up confidence, or ego, about what is possible. We have to change that.

“The second problem,” he continues, “is the money velocity and convenience problem – or the known versus unknown problem. The hard infrastructure, whether that’s groins or seawalls or just dredging… these practices in some ways have a clear cost and timeline, and we’re used to operating in that mindset. And nature doesn’t work that way. Things grow, change and adapt on their own timeline.”

Working with waves and currents to preserve islands and coastlines requires a change in mindset that is difficult, but ultimately worth it, says Tibbits.