The idea that an entire island can disappear seems unbelievable, anathemic to our understanding of the natural world, even offensive to rational thinking. Something substantial and upstanding shouldn’t vanish in less time than it would once have taken you to walk around its perimeter. Yet this has undeniably happened in many places, and many times.
Today you won’t find an island named Tolamp on any map. But if you travel among the smaller islands off the east coast of 2041 sq. km Malekula, the second-largest island in Vanuatu, in the southwest Pacific, and ask about it, chances are you’ll learn where it once was and how, several hundred years ago, it abruptly disappeared. Local people may tell you how two mischievous boys, left behind on Tolamp after all the adults travelled to the mainland, went to the other side of the island – where they had been forbidden to go – and dug a hole into which the ocean poured and eventually submerged the entire island. As with most such stories, the details are undoubtedly apocryphal – blame is a common way of rationalising such events – but the recollection of submergence is undoubtedly true.
Owing to their implausible
