Today I had lunch with a friend whom went to Hawaii in the summer.? I made an comment about the size of Waikiki beach seems shrinked.? I remember when I visit Hawaii many years ago as a little kid, the Waikiki beach seems bigger.? This friend and my friends I went Hawaii with agree with me, as they all recall Waikiki was very big.? I came up with two theory explaining the reduce in size.? First theory is global warming, the sea level rise and drown the beach.? Second theory is part of the beach is converted into new hotels.? My friend points out the hotels by the beach are not brand new, they have been around for many years.? So my second theory is not very convincing.? The first theory doesn’t make much scientific sense since the sea level has only raise a few centimeters in the past 10 years, it should not eat up a large chunk of the beach.? I try to find some data on the web about Waikiki’s size, but every link on google is just useless advertisments.? Someone should write a search enginer that filters out commerical sites, only return informative site with information I am looking for.? Here comes one last theory, maybe our memory had cheated all of us.? The Waikiki beach is always the same size.? It looks bigger back then because we were much smaller.? When I was search for the information of? Waikiki’s size, I came across the answer for a question puzzled me for a few days.? There is a canal on the north side of Waikiki, and I always wonder what is it for.? The Ala Wai Canal was dig to drain the water from weland.? Waikiki was originally a swamp.? The beautiful beach and the land of all resort hotels are man made.