Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island
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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.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
Fuente: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece
Greetings, I am greived to hear that the predictions of the rising seas have already taken into effect and we are now dealing with the consequences of our insufficient efforts to stop global warming. I have thought of a proposal to present to the U.N. if possible, but I am unfamiliar to the procedure of how to introduce this idea in order for it to be even considered.
U.N. Diplomacy Proposal: Saving the Amazon
In order to conserve the Amazon as a National Reservation Park, Brazil should be given a fee paid by the U.N. to protect it from vultures and to assist in raising its job opportunities for its population. Any land that forms part of the Amazon may not be owned by corporate companies either prior to this diplomacy nor after.
I am hoping that this will stop the burning of the Amazon, since the Brazilian people are mainly burning the amazon as a mean to expand there agriculture. If the U.N. may provide them with another job resource and secure the economy of its government, then the Amazon could help ALL of us with global warming. At least giving us more time to find a way to combat its effects.
Please help me get this message sent to the right people so that it can be heard and at least taken into consideration by our U.N. leaders.
Thank-you
Michellie Hernandez