First inhabited island lost to global warming.

First inhabited island lost to global warming.

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

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


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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how come the seas have only risen there and nowhere else......to me it appears that the island sank.....a bit like Atlantis did

That is just silly Stretch. There are a lot of places in the world that have tens of thousands of acres barely above sea level. Bangladesh comes to mind because they are right on the edge of disaster.

true, but is Bangladesh going under? The sea doesnt rise in just one place...its a thin liquid, self leveling, if it rose enough to cover an Island, I would assume that it would be noticed elsewhere, far away.

If my memory serves me correctly, the main st of Cairns in Far North Queensland, Australia is 1ft below sea level and and only a few 100mts from the beach. I'd have thought it would've been notice there at least.....

Whether you want to believe it or not, the sea level is rising, and has been for some time. I'm sure Lohachara was not much more than a big sand bar but it was inhabited for centuries. Now it is gone.
Bangladesh needs to do something now, but they probably won't and we'll see massive flooding in a few years, and no doubt massive immigration.

True the sea has been rising, but there's something fishy about an island just "quietly going under" as this story seems to imply. I mean, it seems to me the first sign would be water washing over the village at high tide, then receding again at low tide. It wouldn't be an "all of a sudden out of nowhere we're under water" kind of process.

True the sea level has been rising. The Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England used to be a peninsula. Of course over the last 10,000 years it has become an island so you can't say it was man made global warming that caused it. Sounds more like erosion than global warming this time, it is in a river after all.

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Not everything is global warming, some islands are just big sandbanks and they do disappear. And this did happen in 1988 not recently.

From your link:

most of the netherlands is below sea level. The reason that they, and those in Cairns don't "notice" it, is that there is HIGHER ground between the sea and the place which is below sea level, which stops the sea from flooding the area. Often that higher ground is dozens of feet higher, thus allowing a large change in sea level before flooding becomes a danger

Oh dear, GW alarmists can't even get their fiction right.

The GW alarmists are a lot like the 9/11 truthers.If a fact does not fit into their scenario of doom and gloom it will be discarded.I do believe that the earth has been warming up for a long time. In fact since the last ice age,and it will continue to warm up until the next ice age.

Yeah, looking at the information about that island, it doesn't prove Global Warming, as it sunk before (As stated in some above links)

"Lohachara Island was an islet which was permanently flooded in the 1980s."

".... In 1974 the Farakka Barrage began diverting water into the Hoogly River during its dry season. During each monsoon season almost all the Bengali delta is submerged, much of it for half a year. The sediment of the lower delta plain is primarily advected inland by monsoonal coastal setup and cyclonic events. One of the greatest challenges people living on the Ganges Delta may face in coming years is the threat of rising sea waters caused by subsidence (sinking) in the region. Residents have to be careful building on the river delta, as severe flooding sometimes occurs.

A 1990 study noted "There is no evidence that environmental degradation in the Himalayas or a 'greenhouse'-induced rise in sea level have aggravated floods in Bangladesh."

Sounds like the explinations are pretty obvious as to why islands are sinking in that area.

As for where I live, besides the typical erosions that occur over the years along the coast lines, Nova Scotia still isn't anymore underwater then it was when I was a wee lad.

The moment my home is under 30 feet of ocean, I'll let you guys all know.

I would say that global warming and sea level rise has a lot to do with the demise of Lohachara Island. The ocean didn't just suddenly open up and swallow that island but higher tides and salt water gradually, over a period of years wrecked the island for farming and erosion washed away the rest of it. The fact remains that ten thousand people used to live on Lohachara Island.

Which they probably shouldn't have migrated to live in the first place. This is why there was such a big stink over how many were suffering in the Delta of Myanmar after they got hit by the cyclone.... Deltas are not a smart place to be living in if you don't like how affected they become from such natural occurances. They are easily shifted, changed, flooded, they rise, they fall.... they're not a steady set of land.

You claim that over years, Global Warming causes these places to sink or disapear, but other explinations such as:

"There are multiple causes of the disappearances of islands in the delta, including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, cyclones (while the number of cyclones has decreased, their intensity has increased), mangrove destruction and coastal flooding."

Also explains (in a better way imo) what caused it to sink under water. Through drastic weather patterns like a cyclone, much of the waves and wind will cause much of the terrain to erode and shift, which sometimes causes the surface to go underwater, or perhaps increase and rise, depending on where and when these occur.

Cyclones have a big effect on this, and their amounts of decrease yet their power increasing matches my other beliefs of their effects on the environment, including what occurs with Deltas.

If you want a list of former islands:

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Most of the Islands spoken of in the above link when you click on them individually, usually talk of sinking in the ocean from erosion or gradually turning into Marshlands/swamps.

Such is the cycle of the Earth. Lands rise and fall.... the tectonic plates are still moving today and environmental patterns like hurricanes, tornados, waterways shifting, etc. all play a part in this..... I wouldn't label it with such a generic term as "Global Warming" because it not only doesn't give us any real explination, but it doesn't come close to getting us near a conclusion/solution.

Sea levels have certainly risen enough to cause problems for those living on these river delta islands where a few inches could make the difference between survival and disaster.

islands

Like I said, they shouldn't have been that stupid to live on Deltas in the first place. Might as well build your summer home on a sandbar for all the good it's gonna do for you.

And looking at your graph, I have a few questions:

How come the Reference Range starts back in 1850? Wouldn't we have some accurate recordings from then up to today?

Was this graph created back in 1850 where the reference range and guess match up?

Why is the range so wild around 2000 when we are currently living and able to take accurate readings and why does the accuracy continue to get even worse the further ahead you go in time?

Wouldn't one expcet the older readings to be more innacurate due to less data and available information of the time, compared to today?

And one more thing: Reference Best Guess? WTF is that?

Guessing isn't what I call accurate information.

But perhaps this chart might shed some more information to debate:

The way I read it is that the sea level was within the reference range and the best guess was where the IPCC people thought it to be within that range. Wasn't 1850 about the start of the industrial revolution? Being that the graph came from the IPCC, I would think it was.

I agree with you on the folly of living on a river delta. We never seem to learn.

Well, in Cairns' case the land between coast and main st wouldn't be any more than a foot high, if that.....