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.'"

Comments

Local Sea Level Rise???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sea levels can't just rise in one place. They haven't risen enough to submerge islands. Period. Subsidence is to blame here.

Rising sea level?

[johndiii]

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.

Re:"Always attribute to global warming...

[rrkbogie]

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.

Sandbar, not island

[Orgasmatron]

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.

Re:HEY now.

[inthealpine]

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.

Dispute over sandbar resolved

[SEWilco]

• Why was there a heated dispute? Because the island was at the mouth of the river which forms the border between the two countries.
• When did this dispute start? When the island appeared in 1970 after a hurricane.
• What kind of island was it? Sand and silt. It's a sandbar. Or it was, until it was washed away.