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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.'"
If you can't play nice with your toys and share, mom will take them off you.
I say this year we nominate Global Warming for the Nobel Peace Prize for providing a peaceful solution to this heated dispute between Bangladesh and India.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
New Moore Island, eh?
So the new name is now No More Island, right?
I thought global warming was a myth? Darth Cheney said so.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's not Global Warming it's Global Climate change. That way, when it comes resurfaces, we can blame it again!
~Mekkah
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Hurry! Buy into my company's carbon credits scheme so you can keep polluting!" -Al Gore
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...
"...stand in the way of a good ad hominem. HAHA! Al Gore's fat!"
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go listen to Rush while I jerk off to a picture of Ann Coulter.
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.
If the water is still less than say 3 feet deep, crossbreed some sheep with dolphins and start farming leaping mutton!
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?
This is clearly *not* global warming or "rising seas" but old boring "erosion" (I know, not fun).
Consider this - less than 30 years ago India could sent paratroopers to this island's "rocky shores" (sic).
Seas were rising 2mm per year until 2000 and 5mm per year thereafter, so we are talking about a rise of 2*20 + 5 * 10 = 90 mm , less than 10cm, or for those US-residents - about 3.5 inches.
I am sorry, but something smells fishy here - a place can't be 3.5 inches above water surface and have "rocky shores" which paratroopers can walk on. Consider that a tidal range in those parts is at least a few feet, so those 3.5 inches would have to completely disappear under water once or twice a day. That would make this land a "shoal" by any maritime definition.
If this island no longer exists it is because it has been washed away, as these things often occur, especially in river deltas - perhaps after a cyclone or hurricane. Nothing to see here, move along.
***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
You kids today think you have it so tough because all you can come up with in your "WE ALL GONNA DIE!" scenario is that you might have to abandon a few coastal cities and loose a few fucking islands?!?!? Let me tell you something, ladies--back in my day, we had REAL fears, like nuclear winter. We had roving packs of post-nuclear-holocaust marauders ready to cut our heads off just to steal a lousy tank of gasoline and some shotgun shells in OUR fucking doomsday scenarios! Has a little rising seawater ever caused your hair and teeth to fall out? Huh? Has a little coastal flooding ever caused packs of cannibals to roam the lands looking to rape your wife and have you for dinner? I don't think so! Ever had a supercomputer start an apocalyptic war with some slowly melting ice caps? Not likely!
Grow up and get some real irrational fears, you pansies.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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?
So the Wikipedia (I know) says New Moore Island was never higher than two meters above the water. Oh, and that was at low tide. Was this any more than a shoal?
Are you (or the FA writer) claiming the ocean there has risen as much as more than a meter???
I call BS. In fact, I suspect it was erosion that has claimed this island. Maybe, MAYBE accelrated by a few centimeters rise in ocean level, if at all. Wind and water do just fine on their own. In fact, the island was close to, if not within, the main channel of the outlet of the Hariabhanga River. Erosion and currents probably did it in.
What a pantload. Global warming? More likely predictable current-based erosion.
New Moore Island wasn't much of an island. The river took it back.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Quite true. And I say this as someone who agrees with the ~97% of active, publishing climate scientists who accept global warming. You can't just point to something that matches one theory or another and say that it's caused by that theory. That's unscientific. That assumes that there can only be one cause for a given course of action. Another couple examples of it on the pro-warming side are Atlantic hurricanes and the Kilimanjaro glaciers. A good example on the denier side is all of the people trying to argue that a cold, snowy winter in the US means that global warming is fake -- as though US = World and "1 year's weather" = Climate. Just like weather provides a huge amount of noise atop the climate signal (in this case, due to a record North Atlantic Oscillation), sandbars form and get erased on their own. No sea level rise required.
Sea level rise is primarily a long-term threat, and primarily when compounded with storms (rather than on its own). It starts out slow but accelerates significantly over time.
The Spanish-English dictionary is out of ink.