Research suggests Tangier is losing nine acres of land a year to erosion and rising tides.

"We have a pretty high degree of certainty that things are going to get wetter and wetter," Carlton J. Hershner Jr., a climate-change scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, told the Associated Press in 2013. "Not to be a bearer of bad news for Tangier, but that would suggest that sometime in the next 50 to 100 years the island would basically be underwater."