Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea 460
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.'"
Wait - what? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. Increases in sea level are not new phenomena. No doubt they were produced by all that fossil fuel consumption 20,000 years ago.
Global warming? Or.... (Score:2, Informative)
Global warming? Or mere subsidence?
(Or both?)
Local Sea Level Rise??? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Born by global cooling. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:"Always attribute to global warming... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [sciencedirect.com]
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.
is that photo real ? YAHOO punted (Score:3, Informative)
Sandbar, not island (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Talpatti_Island [wikipedia.org]
Move along, nothing to see here.
Re:Born by global cooling. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
From the summary at the top of this very page:
Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols
Re:HEY now. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Global warming? Or.... (Score:5, Informative)
***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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:"Always attribute to global warming... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Beautiful essay on eroding islands (Score:3, Informative)
Dispute over sandbar resolved (Score:5, Informative)
An Island over a sink hole? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Rising sea level? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Agreed. Loss of a small island mass is more likely to be due to water-based excavation below the surface and the resultant settling of the land mass. We don't know, for example, that this island is on bedrock. If it is a silt deposit, then there's no reason to assume it has permanence in anything but the shortest time spans. That part of the world is one huge river delta, lending credence to the silt deposit idea.
A couple of web clicks, and WIkipedia's introductory, summary sentence says it all: "South Talpatti Island as it was known in Bangladesh, or New Moore Island or Purbasha as it was known in India, was a small uninhabited offshore island that emerged in the Bay of Bengal in the aftermath of the Bhola cyclone in 1970 and disappeared at some later point." Therefore we can conclude that it was unlikely to be Global Warming / Climate Change, or whathaveyou in this case, but, rather, normal above and below-surface erosion and settling. It would appear that Prof. Hazara has made a naive mistake.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:5, Informative)
It's also a big problem with large sandbars created in the 1970s by a flipping hurricane, the current object of dispute.
Hmmm (Score:1, Informative)
Ok ... hold on a sec. The whole global warming climate change is supposed to be making sea levels rise at a very slow rate. We're talking less than inches per year. I read that this island used to have at least a mile of earth sticking out of the water. I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that this land was more than a few inches above sea level. Now, all of the sudden it just disappears?? wtf? Was it slowly disappearing at a rate of millimeters per year? Reading the article doesn't seem to indicate this. The article is worded as "They were fighting over an island and then 'poof' it disappears underwater" Ok.. if the sea levels just rose 10 feet in a day then yes I think that's cause for alarm. Somehow, I don't think this was the case
Re:Local Sea Level Rise??? (Score:5, Informative)
Sea levels can't just rise in one place.
Yes they can. For one example, consider the difference in sea level between the two sides of the Panama Canal of about 8 inches, mostly due to salinity and air pressure differences.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:An Island over a sink hole? (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect that local subsidence and/or erosion is responsible.
Subsidence is typical in deltas if there has been any kind of civil engineering projects such as diversion of freshwater for human use, dykes, or other flood control projects. And indeed, this has occurred in the Ganges delta.
This link [blogspot.com] claims that subsidence in the Ganges delta is 4mm/year, while sea level rise is only 1.4mm/year.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Talpatti_Island
that page tells the whole story of this Island, how it appeared naturally in the 1970s, and also shows that it's more erosion than global warming that made it disappear
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:3, Informative)
Not their job? You don't seem to get it: if you don't present your evidence in a way that the layperson can grasp they will not support the policies you want to ameliorate/reverse climate change
No, you don't seem to get it. The public isn't even remotely qualified to assess the validity of claims that, say, how the Charney sensitivity will be affected by variations in gamma from coupled climate-carbon cycle models with differening geospatial and temporal resolution, or how the Solomon et al stratospheric water vapor rise ties in with methane atmospheric residency times. So if you have both the warmers and deniers dumb down their argument for public consumption, the public will go with whichever scientist did a better job of dumbing down their argument, even if the overwhelming portion of the people who actually do understand the science can tell that that one's "science" is pure hokum. And even worse, you'll have various groups with political agendas selectively reporting on the dumbed-down arguments of a particular side (Fox, MSNBC, email forwards, blogs, etc).
What you're asking them to do is like asking asking a third grader to pick a design for a particle collider based on dumbed-down descriptions by competing scientists -- or worse, a scientist and a non-scientist hired by an industry with a massive budget. And then having the third grader only hear one of their arguments. There's no way the audience in question can make a valid, informed decision on the topic because the amount of background required is too great.
To bring it back to warming: countless people online have bought into a lot of *really, really* dumb arguments being pushed by people like Monckton, Watts, and others. Let's just trot out a random one: the argument that "warming precedes CO2, so CO2 isn't the cause of warming". Even a most basic climatology education will tell you that what's being talked about here are Milankovitch cycles, which are a classic case of CO2 *amplifying* an external forcing on geological timescales (the calculated Milankovitch orbital forcings are far too small to explain the existing warming, but the warming is easily understood in the context of the orbital forcings plus the CO2 feedback induced by the orbital forcing -- the CO2 levels being readily measurable in ice core gas bubbles). But the people hearing these arguments don't have that background to know this. So they look at the graphs and think, "Aha! Those dumb scientists got it backwards!"
I know you don't want to accept this. But the reality is that unless you're willing to spend years learning about the subject, you are not qualified to assess the science. "Dumbed down" or not.