Can we start to take global warming serious now?
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 is already too late for these people.
Photo credit: shunya.net
2 comments:
Wrong. The island was basically a sandbar with trees on it, they cut the trees down and the sand washed away.
Now a few years later the island has come back! Either the sea level has dropped or something else is going on.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata-/Lohachara-rises-from-waters-again/articleshow/4352475.cms
@JeffDeWitt - Wrong. The island was an island that still had plenty of trees on it (one of the largest mangrove forests - Google is your friend) and it slowly disappeared as the water kept coming up.
Now, a few years later, the island is building up with silt! (Hello? It's in a river delta...) But that's hardly coming back now, is it?
Brains are meant to be used, not just to separate the ears.
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