Global warming claims Indian island

[Guest guest]

Pranam. I read this in another group and wished to share it with you all. It certainly makes me think...

With Love

Shankaree

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

 

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.

 

 

 

Let my every word be a prayer to Thee,

Every movement of my hands a ritual gesture to Thee,

Every step I take a circumambulation of Thy image,

Every morsel I eat a rite of sacrifice to Thee,

Every time I lay down a prostration at Thy feet;

Every act of personal pleasure and all else that I do,

Let it all be a form of worshiping Thee."

 

>From Verse 27 of Shri Aadi Shankara's Saundaryalahari

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Thanks for posting this.It is sad that this is happening. Though

this partcular submegence was not predicted, there is a view that

both Bangladesh and India's West Bengal are under serious long term

threat and major land water adjustments are expected.

 

, Shankaree Ramatas

<shankaree wrote:

>

> Pranam. I read this in another group and wished to share it with

you all. It certainly makes me think...

>

> With Love

>

> Shankaree

>

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

>

> Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

>

> >

>