America's first climate refugees? Reports predicts hundreds will flee Tangier island

On a remote island in the Chesapeake Bay, residents of Tangier Islands go about business as usual. People work as commercial crabbers or oyster fisherman, and travel about the island's 1.2 square miles in golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation. A trusty mail boat pulls into the harbor daily to deliver food and supplies, rain or shine.

There's just one problem: The island is disappearing beneath their feet.

Climate change and extreme weather events affect low-lying coastal areas around the world, including, most famously, the far-off islands Kiribati and the Maldives.

Here in the US, rising sea levels threaten to submerge Virginia's Tangier Islands underwater in the next 100 years, according to a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.

The authors of the study believe if preventative action is not taken, Tangier's residents may need to be relocated as early as 2040 — becoming the first climate change refugees in the continental US.

Here's what it's like to live there.

Additional reporting and photos by Christian Storm.

Looking out from a dock in Crisfield, Maryland, you just might miss the Tangier Islands on the horizon. Only the water tower is visible from the US mainland.

Located in the heart of Chesapeake Bay, Captain John Smith and his crew explored the islands in 1608. The Pocomoke Indians camped there long before then.

Back in the seventeenth century, Tangier existed as a single plot of land. But rising sea levels flooded it and broke the mass into a constellation of islands.