Will Donald Trump - and US taxpayers - save the Elizabethans of Tangier Island from being America's 'first climate change refugees'?

The sun sets on a cross reading "Christ is Life" on a waterway in Tangier, Virginia, May 15, 2017, where climate change and rising sea levels threaten the inhabitants of the slowly sinking island
The sun sets on a cross reading "Christ is Life" on a waterway in Tangier, Virginia, May 15, 2017, where climate change and rising sea levels threaten the inhabitants of the slowly sinking island Credit: AFP

Discovered by the English explorer John Smith in 1608, Tangier Island is the only place in the United States where a form of Old English is spoken to this day.

Locals on the island, in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, are descended from Cornish settlers and still speak a dialect so thick that Americans fourteen miles away on the Virginia shoreline struggle to understand them.

The community has survived for more than four centuries, proudly protecting its traditions throughout Independence, the American Civil War and globalisation - but now faces a new, potentially catastrophic threat: a disappearing coastline.

The isolated fishing community finds itself under the global microscope as its inhabitants are warned that they could become America's first climate change refugees in as little as 25 years. 

A global debate currently rages over whether the 1.2-square-mile island’s shrinking land mass...

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