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<div><font
color="#2E2E2E"
>http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece</font></div
>
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<div><font size="+2" color="#2E2E2E">Disappearing world: Global
warming claims tropical island</font></div>
<div><font size="+2" color="#2E2E2E"><br>
</font><font color="#2E2E2E"><b>For the first time, an inhabited
island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor
Geoffrey Lean reports</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="-3" color="#2E2E2E">Published: 24
December 2006, The Independent</font></div>
<div><font face="Times" size="+1" color="#000000"><br>
</font><font color="#2E2E2E">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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
<b>Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000
people homeless</b></font></div>
<div><font color="#2E2E2E"><br>
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.</font><br>
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