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Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea
RawJoe writes "India and Bangladesh have argued for almost 30 years over control of a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have ended the argument for them: the island's gone. From the article: '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.'"
From TFA: Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) annually
So er we're talking a foot of water every 60 years? Sounds almost scary, except when you put it into context. Increases in sea level are not new phenomena. No doubt they were produced by all that fossil fuel consumption 20,000 years ago.
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Sea levels can't just rise in one place. They haven't risen enough to submerge islands. Period. Subsidence is to blame here.
According to the article, sea level has been rising by 0.2 inches per year. This would imply a rise of about two inches since 2000. Over the previous twenty years (back to the origin of the dispute over the island), the rise would have been about 2.4 inches, using the figures in the article. So the island, at its highest point would have been less than five inches above sea level.
According to the Wikipedia entry, the "highest elevation of the island had never exceeded two meters above sea level." Which would indicate that it was at least one meter above sea level at some point, meaning that the cited increases in sea level could not have accounted for the disappearance of the island. For the quoted rise in sea level over time, it would take about 330 years for the sea to rise one meter.
Yet "oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta" said "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming." One would think that a university professor would have a slightly better grasp of the numbers than that. It helps nothing to make clearly false claims about the effects of climate change.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
For people thinking this was a huge old island that is not so. The island came into being during the 1970 after a cyclone.
Since the talk that it is gone came from a single photo will be interesting to know if the picture was taken during high or low tide.
There's lots of information available on the subsidence, via plate tectonics, of the Bay of Bengal, for exameple:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6X-4B4PWYT-1&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F02%2F2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1269324457&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=098986c85bd272474f1579b29771b39c
The islands are made of silt deposited by the river, and rise and fall depending or whether or not the river floods are depositing mud and building up islands faster than wave erosion and subsidence of the underlying plate are taking them down. The process is weather dependent, but weather is not the only significant force at work. The islands have come and gone before and will do so again.
This is a sandbar in an estuary. It first accumulated enough silt to poke above the surface back in 1974, and was never more than 2 meters high. In addition, the nearest tide gauge is showing +0.54 (+/- 0.52, heh) mm per year rise in sea level, meaning that it would have taken nearly 4000 years for the local change in sea level to have caused it to disappear.
If you insist on bringing up global warming, you have to blame the sandbar's emergence on global cooling during the 70s and notice that we are now back where we started. A much wiser choice would be to simply notice that rivers flush crap down stream, and ignore this "island" the way we ignore all the other sandbars and ephemera.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/25/bengal-island-succumbs-to-global-warming-nonsense-ap-gets-nutty-over-loss-of-a-sandbar/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Talpatti_Island
Move along, nothing to see here.
See that "Preview" button?
Everyone was having fun until the climate change evangelist showed up.
I mean has anyone even looked into exactly why water covers more of the island now? Have the coast lines reflected the same gain? Is the island sinking under it's own weight?
I know I'm killing everyone's climate change buzz by asking some basic questions, but it's not my fault the climate change evangelist made me do it.
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***Global warming? Or mere subsidence?***
Subsidence or wave erosion of course. Sea Level rise continues at about 29 cm (a foot for us Americans) a century. Rates computed from sea level gauge and satellite data are similar. I'm guessing that it would take about 500-1000 years to get anything that was called an island rather than a reef to go away at current rates of sea level rise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
FYI, according to the USGS, the Himalayas are rising approximately 1cm per year (likely to assume land can drop that fast due to tectonic activity as well). According to the first line of the wikipedia page, the rate of ocean rise has averaged 1.8mm per year. So tectonics can be over 5 times as fast as ocean rising. Geological processes can quickly raise, lower, or split land. In an earthquake, landmasses can move several METERS in minutes. Tectonics is vastly more powerful than even the worst predictions of global warming.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
One can easily check the last 10 years of photos of that region and determine that the coastal area less than 3 miles from the island hasn't changed at all. IF the ocean was rising enough to cover the island it should also move the shore back enough to be visible in the photos. It hasn't. I suspect that local subsidence and/or erosion is responsible. But, when you religiously believe in the AGW Hammer everything you see is a nail.
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It's also a big problem with large sandbars created in the 1970s by a flipping hurricane, the current object of dispute.