70,000 In India, Bangladesh Face Immediate Threat From Rising Seas As Sundarbans Start To Go Under

[hatrack]

Rising seas attributed to human induced global warming have submerged Lohachara island, once the home to 10,000 people. Unhinhabited Suparibhanga has also vanished, while the inhabited island of Ghoramara has lost two thirds of its area to the rising seas in the Bay of Bengal.

While we were all distracted by Christmas festivities, this sober news on the impact of climate change was published in The Independent (UK), about the inundation of various Sundarban islands in the Indian part of the delta region of the Ganges and Brahmaputra river, where they empty into the Bay of Bengal.

The region is considered remote and researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University discovered the submergence through examining satellite photos of the area. According to the report in the Independent, Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, said that there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta.

People from Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, which has also lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. Up to a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are immediately threatened by the rising seas inundating homes and livelihoods. In Bangladesh, 17 million people live less than one metre (three feet) above sea level. Rising Sea levels and submergence of habitat also pose a threat to the area's 400 Bengal tigers.

Rising sea levels have already caused the people of the Carteret Islands near New Guinea to start evacuating their homes. They were thought to be the first climate refugees caused by rising sea level. Other island nations such as the Maldives, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Kiribati are imminently threatened.

EDIT

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/12/134906.php

[evlbstrd]

1. Here it comes.

We may be too late.
Maybe they mentioned the tigers to stoke some outrage. What's 17 million Bangladeshis to some cute endagered kitties?

[formercia]

5. No economic benefit

is usually what drives the apathy.

[YankeyMCC]

2. k n r

[Nordmadr]

3. Inhabited Islands going underwater, Arctic thawing, drowning

polar bears, and something I just saw here in New York this morning before heading out to work, ski resorts are losing their asses. Not that the last one compares with the others by any means, but damn, how many indicators do we have to have? We got our first real snow of the year here in my area of upstate New York, and only in pocketed areas of higher elevation at that. It has been way too warm. It has been raining like crazy though.

Olafr

[Delphinus]

4. And, again,

most politicians and Americans stay in ignorance until it affects them personally.

[Jim Lane]

6. My guess is that this wasn't solely because of rising seas

I think the Sundarbans are subject to significant erosion. Rising sea level, by itself, wouldn't have "inundated" the island already. It's possible, though, that the process of erosion became more powerful with higher seas and with the more energetic wind storms that some parts of the world experience as a result of global warming.

[sofa king]

7. Aren't these the islands where myriads are killed every two decades or so?

Cyclone-induced flooding killed over 100,000 people in Bangladesh 1990 and before that in 1971. I recall that virtually as soon as the waters subsided in 1990, people were lining up to move back in. All I remember is that most of the victims were from a series of sandbar-like islands in a river delta somewhere near the India-Bangladesh border. Are these the islands in question?

I am NOT trying to point out some sort of silver lining here. Rather, I'm trying to point out that a rising sea level makes yet another such disaster all the more likely, as a less strong cyclone may be able to reproduce the same tragic results.

[Oerdin]

8. I hate it when journalists spin this crap.

As a geologist let me begin by saying that humans are indeed pumping large amounts of pollutants into the air and are causing global climate change. That said, this article is scientifically illiterate and total nonsense. Even the Bangladeshi government has said so:

"Officials of the Bengal government, however, say cannot directly be linked to climate change. Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels."

http://carbonplanet.com/blog/?p=344

Global warming is real but this is most certainly not the result of global warming. This is a marshy island found in the delta of a major river. A major river which has been dammed to provide hydroelectric power but which now blocks the flow of sediments to the river's delta.

This is exactly what is happening in Louisiana with the lose of the bijou wetlands. The poorly compacted sediments continue to compact and sink as they always have but since the yearly floods of the delta no longer bring as much sediment to the delta there just isn't much new sediments being deposited. The natural result is that the delta is sinking and eroding away.

The mean sea level rise over the last 150 years has only been 4-5 centimeters thus it simply can't be global warming and instead it is the natural result of sediments not reaching the river's delta. The journalists need to just report the facts and let the scientists work out the hows and whys since the journalists do not have the training or the intellectual capacity to qualify themselves for such work.