Global Warming claims tropical island...

[KLN]

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports

Published: 24 December 2006

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

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Giant Ice Shelf Breaks Free in Arctic; Climate Change Cited as Major Factor

Image of broken ice shelf

By Rob Gillies

Associated Press

Saturday, December 30, 2006; A18

TORONTO, Dec. 29 -- A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists have said, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.

The Ayles Ice Shelf -- all 41 square miles of it -- broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists said Thursday that they had discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University in Quebec City, who studies Arctic conditions, said he traveled to the newly formed ice island and couldn't believe what he saw.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."

The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. Packed with ice that is more than 3,000 years old, they float on the sea but are connected to land.

Some scientists say that the shelf's collapse is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major factor.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. "We aren't able to connect all of the dots . . . but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated. Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data -- the event registered on earthquake monitors 155 miles away -- Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

Copland said the speed with which climate change has affected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

"Even 10 years ago, scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually, so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly," he said.

[KLN]

I've read that the broken ice shelf was the size of 11,000 football fields.

[mateo22]

this is definitely an issue that we as a human race need to stand up and take action on! The scary thing is....what can we really do? I think it has to revolve more around what we can start doing to change how we live then trying to stop it....every time I hear stories about this topic or even do research of my own it seems to be the case that we need to start making changes in how we live....

Kenny, thanks for posting~

[darraholic]

Poor Vanuatu. Survivor went there a few years ago.

[Scotty]

damn, this is some scary stuff...I read somewhere once where, if global warming continues, then the Gulf Coast of the USA may be as far north as Kentucky or Tennessee. Bye bye Florida.

[KLN]

Damn, and we think it's crowded now! LoL

[JinkiesP]

Gives a whole new meaning to that old George Strait song "Ocean Front property in Arizona."

[Drew]

It's the middle of winter here in southwestern Ontario Canada, and aside from that one snow storm at the beginning of december, we have not seen any snow.

[Ms. Walsh]

We haven't gotten any snow here either, except for one flurry that lasted 10 minutes and some cases of ice.

Well, when the waters start to rise, my house is going bye-bye b/c we live on the coast. I guess it's time to move to my cousins' farm in Iowa.

The scary thing is that the gov't really doesn't care. Republicans think that all the talk about the environmental crisis is liberal propaganda! I can't believe how many people refuse to acknowledge that there's a huge problem going on. The US has to start taking responsibility: I mean, we are the ones producing over 25% of the pollution in the world! If we started making improvements, it would help a lot and probably would encourage other countries to do so.

[Marilyn_M]

ICAM! Its not a matter of trying to win an election but making a point that our future, their grandchildren and generations to come are going to have to endure if people going down the path they are not. But people are just so damn greedy and worried about the here and now instead of the future; cleaning up the mess we made. We only have one earth and we should take better care of it, but people are just so oblivous and at time very ignorant.