You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Kwong here with Climate Correspondent Lauren Summer, who promises at

a time when many of us are still at home to take us on a journey?

Yes, a journey through space and time.

Ooh, alright, where are we going?

We're going to a tiny, windswept island off the coast of Liverpool England, called

Hilary Island. It's a tidal island, so it's connected to the mainland for part of the

day, and then when the tide comes in, it's cut off.

Ooh, so it's an island sometimes.

Yeah, no one lives there right now. It's just somewhere people go for a day trip.

But the people who used to live out there, they had to keep track of the tides. In the

late 1800s, there were a handful of people there that ran the small telegraph station

and a lifeboat rescue station.

Sounds like my kind of place. Sounds lovely.

They actually recorded the height of the tide every 15 minutes in these huge paper ledgers.

And they did this for decades. I imagine a huge data collection.

Yeah, it's just a ton of data. And for a long time, it's been sitting in an archive because

it seems kind of obscure, right?

Yeah.

But now this data is becoming incredibly valuable, because the oceans are rising increasingly

fast in a hotter climate. And the key question is, how fast millions of people in coastal

communities need to know that in order to prepare in some way, whether it's building infrastructure

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