[Sust-mar] Disappearing islands

[angela bischoff]

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

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, The Independent

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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