Tourists on Easter Island in December 2017. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is a 14-mile-long triangle of land that sits 2,300 miles west of Chile, making it one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. The island is famous for its 900 monumental stone statues, ranging from 2 meters (6.5 feet) to 20 meters high. Among the world’s most recognizable and celebrated cultural landmarks, the works are increasingly under threat from climate change—as is the way of life of the Rapa Nui people. Its history has long fascinated researchers, both locally and internationally. A thriving statue-carving culture of more than 15,000 people in the early 1600s declined within a century to perhaps one-fifth as many. A long-held view blamed resource overuse, leading to ecological and societal collapse. Recent research has suggested that European contact may have set off Rapa Nui’s decline in the decades after a […]