New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged. Photo - Das/AP
Posted on 03/25/2010 9:34:03 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged. Photo - Das/AP
From the New York Daily News via Associated Press reports :
Global warming resolves 30-year land dispute between India, Bangladesh: Coveted island sinks
By NIRMALA GEORGE, Associated Press Writer Nirmala George, Associated Press Writer – Wed Mar 24, 9:29 am ET
NEW DELHI – For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone.
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. “What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Hazra.
Note in the map below that the island was a river estuary, meaning it wasn’t made out of rock as claimed. It was made out of mud and sand. From Wikipedia:
The island was situated only two kilometers from the mouth of the Hariabhanga River. The emergence of the island was first discovered by an American satellite in 1974 that showed the island to have an area of 2,500 sq meters (27,000 sq ft). Later, various remote sensing surveys showed that the island had expanded gradually to an area of about 10,000 sq meters (110,000 sq ft) at low tide, including a number of ordinarily submerged shoals. The highest elevation of the island had never exceeded two meters above sea level. [1]
…
The island was claimed by both Bangladesh and India, although neither country established any permanent settlement there because of the island’s geographical instability. India had reportedly hoisted the Indian flag on South Talpatti in 1981 and established a temporary base of Border Security Forces (BSF) on the island, regularly visiting with naval gunships. [3][4]
The AP claim (probably from Seth Borenstein) is that global warming induced sea level rise has submerged the island, and that is complete nonsense.
Let’s look at sea level trends in the region. Here’s the NOAA Tides and Currents map of the area from their interactive web site.
NOAA’s nearest tide gauge shows sea level rising in that region at 0.54 mm / year, which means that would take nearly 2000 years for sea level to rise one meter. See the plot below:
Note that since the island was first discovered in 1974, the sea level graph above shows 19.4 mm (0.76 inches) rise based on a rate of 0.54mm/year.
Sea level rise is a relative phenomenon. It can be caused by sea rising, or land sinking. Sort of like sitting on a train at the station, and you can’t tell if your train has started moving or the adjacent one.
Looking at a satellite image of the Bangladesh delta, one can see how tides, currents, silts, and other factors shape what is a tenuous boundary between land and sea:
Temporary estuary islands and sandbars appear and disappear all the time worldwide. Sometimes it can take a few years, sometimes a few centuries. Note that most of the area near South Talpatti Island is only 1-3 meters above sea level anyway, which means that such low lying islands made of mud and sand are prone to the whims of tide and currents and weather.
Thanks for the graphics and pictures - very illuminating.
Stupid stupid stupid. Sand bars come and go with the currents, waves and storms. Just normal erosion, these nuts will jump on anything.
Hopefully AlGore went down with it!
The AGW Alarmists are looking for anything.,....just anything.... to keep the AGW propaganda going.....
Last summer I was at the beach with my kids and we built a sand castle. It was like 2 hours later, the ocean took it away. Must have been because I drove there in my internal-combustion devil’s wagon.
If the island was 2 meters above sea level, and now is submerged, that means the level of the Indian Ocean must have risen by, say, eight feet in the last 10 years or so.
And someone only noticed this yesterday?
Bengal Island succumbs to global warming nonsense – AP gets nutty over the loss of a sandbar
“If the island was 2 meters above sea level, and now is submerged, that means the level of the Indian Ocean must have risen by, say, eight feet in the last 10 years or so.”
The warmists have a name for this. They call it “Abrupt Climate Change”. Worried that no one would care if a sandbar disappeared in 100,000,000 years, they began claiming these events would begin happening within our very lifetimes. One moment a patch of sand in the Bay of Bengal vanishes, the next New York City is underwater!
Climate change hoax on a sinking island
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From deccanchronicle.com
February 7th, 2010
By Richard Orange
You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide has already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the deluded hope of building the island back up. And each monsoon, the sea rips the crude barriers down, tearing off another chunk of his birthright. He is like a modern-day Canute.
As we sipped tea outside Ajay’s large mud bungalow, I excitedly scribbled notes, imagining how all this would go down in the Ecologist magazine, or perhaps the London-based Independent. It had already run an article reporting the disappearance of the next-door island of Lohachara, “the first inhabited island to be claimed by climate change”. I felt sure they’d love this too. But when I asked Ajay what he made of the fact that all of his troubles were the direct result of heavy industry thousands of miles away, he looked at me like I was mad.
“It’s not because of global warming, it’s because of natural erosion”, he said. “People settled this island before they should have, the land mass is unstable”.
I smiled inwardly. It was, perhaps, too much to expect a simple village leader to have a full grasp of the science of global warming. But later, as I examined the dramatic waterline of Ghoramara, I began to have doubts. There were steep, jagged mud cliffs, two or three metres high, marking where the rough sea had torn off strips of land in the last monsoon. Wouldn’t a submerging island sit a bit lower in the water? The other giveaway were the local names for the rivers. There’s the Matla (the drunken river), and the Ichamati (the free-willed river), both named because of the frequency with which they shift course, destroying land here and throwing up new land elsewhere.
Then there’s New Moore Island, which appeared in the Sunderbans for the first time in 1970 and has been growing apace ever since (causing a dispute between India and Bangladesh as to who should own it). New Moore Island was 2,500 square metres when it emerged. It’s around 10,000 square metres today, and such is the scale of the sedimentary deposits building up around it that it’s expected to hit 25 square kilometres in a couple of decades.
To my shame, I must confess that I still tried to make the story work long after all this was apparent. And I imagine every other journalist who has arrived on these islands with global warming in mind has done exactly the same thing.
It wasn’t until I met Sugata Hazra, the director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, in nearby Kolkata, and the man who claimed to have discovered the disappearance of Lohachara in 2002, that the alarm bells started ringing at full volume. Dr Hazra claimed that “relative sea levels” in the Sunderbans were rising at 3.2 mm a year, about twice the global rate. It seemed fishy to me.
Geologically, the Sunderbans may be sinking. The weight of the sediment coming down the Ganges from the Himalayas is gradually tilting the plate on which it sits. But this has nothing to do with global warming or rising sea levels. After all, no one ever links New Moore Island’s rise to “relative falling sea levels”.
If about 2.2 mm of Hazra’s 3.2 mm came from “natural subsidence” and erosion, as Hazra’s own 2002 study admitted, wasn’t it a bit misleading to blame rising sea levels? “It’s a complicated process that isn’t fully understood”, was all Dr Hazra said when pressed.
On the nearby island of Ganga Sagar, the wild divergence between Dr Hazra’s account and that of the villagers became embarrassingly obvious. Those set to lose their land were certainly suffering. But no one blamed rising sea levels. They blamed the government’s unwillingness to spend money on a proper concrete breakwater, and the shortsightedness of the well-meaning philanthropists who had settled them there over the last 100 years.
This is what Ajay Patra had meant by the land being settled too soon. Up until the late 19th century, very few people lived on the Sunderban islands, partly because of their tendency to vanish every hundred years or so. It was a Scot, Sir Daniel Hamilton, who pioneered the settlement on Sagar, and at around the same time Ghoramara and Lohachara were settled with landless peasants by their owner — a socially-minded maharaja from the mainland. Neither gave much thought as to why the land was uninhabited. It’s their lack of foresight that’s to blame for the plight of the Sunderban islanders.
Some time later, when I was back in London for a few weeks, I came across an issue of the Ecologist. On the front cover was a spindly Indian boy of about 11, standing on a small spit of muddy sand, completely surrounded by water — as if the photographer had somehow chanced upon the island at the exact point of its disappearance. It was the island of Ghoramara. “His exhausted body a prisoner to the Bay of Bengal’s violent tides, Dependra Das stretches out his bony arms” ran the introduction. The headline was: “The world’s first environmental refugees”.
and in the Gobi desert, a two foot high sand bump has been blown away by high winds, fueled by an ever warming planet. We are all gonna die by 2031, or somewhere thereabouts.
Now that is a great story! ! !
Gore Quixote must have his dragons to slay...
Icelandic fissure eruption triggers worries-A unique Iceland volcanic eruption covered by BBC.
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Links supplied by yield 2 the right
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“How the Earth Was Made” aired an episode about Iceland and the unique volcanoes. Very cool and frighting.
Youtube links for 5 parts in HD.
Iceland 2 of 5 HD - How The Earth Was Made
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmCXKq9yAsA
Iceland 3 of 5 HD - How The Earth Was Made
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX4wIc8wH-Q
Iceland 4 of 5 HD - How The Earth Was Mad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTTvRvRIjt0
Iceland 5 of 5 HD - How The Earth Was Made
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8E4rtPiF_Q
Desperation is setting in. That is for sure.
:’) Nice pics!
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