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.'"
Reminds me of kids. (Score:5, Funny)
If you can't play nice with your toys and share, mom will take them off you.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:4, Funny)
If you can't play nice with your toys and share, mom will take them off you.
"Buy land. They've stopped making it." -- Mark Twain.
Addendum: They're deleting it now too.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's not like its completely gone now. According to the article the sea level is raising 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) an year, so the water is only just a little bit over the land. Lay over some sand, wood, whatever and you have land again - or build those wooden houses on piers. Venice is also build on top of water in the middle of a lagoon.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:4, Insightful)
You appear to have forgotten about soil erosion, which is a big problem with unconsolidated soils which are recently submerged.
And regardin edification, you can't just build stuff on disputed land. Israel does that but it only does that because the people they are oppressing can barely muster any rocks to throw at them. You don't do that to a nation which has a semblance of an army.
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.
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Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the power that moving water has.
Water takes material from some places and piles it up in others, and it's incredibly hard to dispute with it. You might look at a sandbar that has been stable for decades, and think maybe I could shift it a bit to suit myself, or make it a little higher and have an island. Forget it. That sandbar is the result of self-organized criticality. It *looks* stable, but the individual sand grains in that sandbar are constantly changing.
My wife grew up near the ocean, and there was this semi circular reef extending from two points on the shore that comes out of the water on spring tides, when you can walk the whole thing. Many times I've surfed my kayak over that reef into the deep water inside. The reef consists of cobbles ranging from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a soccer ball. One day one of the neighborhood kids had an idea: if we breech the reef at one point, we'll be able to anchor our boats inside the reef and not have to pay for a slip or launch fees. Next low tide he had the entire neighborhood carrying rocks away from the selected point, until they'd converted the reef into a pair of breakwaters creating an artificial harbor. It was an impressive feat, but the first storm -- not even a *big* storm mind you, and you couldn't tell the spot they excavated from any other spot. There literally was no trace left of their labors.
What you'd have to do with this sunken island is create a new, artificial island using huge granite boulders like they use in breakwaters; or maybe you could set up coffer dams and build a reinforced concrete sea wall. But you have to admit that you're creating an artificial island.
The reason that India and Bangladesh are fighting over this is to establish Law of the Sea rights to the surrounding water. They are trying to evade negotiations over resource disputes by appealing to a "natural" right in artificial law. Using an uninhabited island to establish territorial sovereignty is dicey enough. Using an *artificial* island is clearly absurd.
They should just resolve the underlying dispute, instead of using legal flim-flammery.
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:5, Funny)
You gave me a great visual which got completely out of control in my head:
Imagine India read your message and thought, "Hey, if we just GO there and build an artificial island, we'd clearly be reamed by the international community... but if we LAUNCHED enormous granite boulders from India into the sea as part of, say, a scientific experiment, and they happened to land on that island and were big enough, we'd have sovereignty again!"
Then of course, Bangladeshi spies discover the plan and formulate a boulder launching initiative of their own.
There's a great boulder arms race, a frantic push to move boulders to the coast, boulders destroyed before they can be loaded by opposition spies, boulder transport sabotage, and when they finally reach the coast and the enormous catapults specifically built by whichever local contractor said they could get them done in time are deployed, the great boulder launching war begins, each launching boulders "harmlessly" as part of scientific experiments toward the same island at the same time, using catapults prone to poor accuracy due to the late contractor bidding and the fact that they were built in India and Bangladesh.
I can see the headline now:
Mar 29, 2014: RARE MID-AIR BOULDER COLLISION RAISING TENSIONS
Indian statesman quoted as saying "This is the fourth incident of Bangladeshi's clearly ruthlessly expansionist government interfering with our harmless scientific experiments through high-tech mid-air boulder tracking technology they have secretly been developing with neighboring terrorist states for years."
Re:Reminds me of kids. (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like it would make a great game too... Maybe we could call it Boulder Dash?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century [youtube.com] seems even more apropos. Only difference is that it's an island instead of Planet X.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That would be my approach to Israel and Palestine problems with Jerusalem Just say no one owns the areas... No residences are allowed but you can visit it for the history and religious pilgrimages. Perhaps the UN will make sure everyone plays fair in the area.
Just one more reason why Global Warming rocks! (Score:5, Funny)
Global warming? Or.... (Score:2, Informative)
Global warming? Or mere subsidence?
(Or both?)
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:Global warming? Or.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just one more reason why Global Warming rocks! (Score:5, Funny)
That guy must suck. A lot.
Dispute over sandbar resolved (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dispute over sandbar resolved (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but obviously that sandbar had been there for millions of years since the 70's and we destroyed it with our man-made global warming.
Where was cap and trade when we needed it most?
Peace Prize (Score:3, Funny)
Fascinating (Score:5, Funny)
New Moore Island, eh?
So the new name is now No More Island, right?
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Funny)
Since its no longer an island, but more likely to become a Coral Reef just off the surface, they'll probably call it Nothing Atoll.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, wait a minute (Score:4, Funny)
I thought global warming was a myth? Darth Cheney said so.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought global warming was a myth? Darth Cheney said so.
That was when it was cold outside. Now it's warm outside, so global warming must be real. It will go back to being a myth in a few months.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Weather |= Climate
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
Weather |= Climate
Weather is now weather or climate? Well that should make the debate easier.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, depending on how the weather has been in your local geographical area. It's THE major problem I've had with the climate change debate. The only public person I've heard who's actually tried to call people on it was Krugman over at the New York Times, who pointed out that by selecting your sample years carefully from the last 10-20 years, you can "prove" anything you want about the climate. He was arguing at the time against the anti-AGW crowd (as you might expect).
As for me, I'm inclined to think we do have some cause for concern, based on what little actual evidence I've seen from both sides of the debate. I'm by no means convinced that we have enough evidence to support one side or another. I also think we have some other very good reasons to reduce carbon emissions, including a need to reduce particulate emissions of all kinds (air pollution), reduce dependence on petroleum products (whose supplies are probably running out), reduce the "need" to colonize the Middle East (eliminate the causes of terrorism), etc.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no "both sides" of the debate. There's the science, which universally points towards global warming (hell, we've even noticed that over the last forty years, migratory birds in the United States have been getting smaller [wordpress.com], which is indicative of generally rising temperatures due to Bergmann's rule [wikipedia.org]), and then there's the people with a PR department, who are busy making it look like there's a debate. Even calling it a "global warming debate" is a victory for them, because the evidence for global warming shows up everywhere.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's the science, which universally points towards global warming
Until you can create replicas of Earth (and probably a large part of the solar system as well) in a laboratory and arrange predictable, repeatable experiments, I don't think any science-oriented person should be making such absolute statements.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that the scientists have PR departments too
Um, what...?
That's news to me. So who funds the scientists' PR departments? Where do they hire their PR agents? Is it one PR agent per scientist, multiple PR agents per scientist, or does each university fund a communal pool of PR agents and contract them out to the scientists? What do I have to major in to become a PR agent for a scientist?
(1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they? Perhaps you might want to consider leaving the climate science to the climate scientistsm who've published literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the subject. Oh, and their "PR departments", too ;)
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
That's news to me. So who funds the scientists' PR departments?
Well, they don't call them PR departments, true. They call them Environmental lobby groups. Groups like the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada, who do actually do good science, but also release press releases that rely more on PR gibberish than actual data. As I said earlier, I don't blame them for doing so, because they need to get their message in a format that most people understand. But it makes things harder for people like me who want to evaluate the evidence.
(1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they?
That's exactly my problem. I want to become reasonably informed about global warming, but I don't have time to go get the appropriate degree, and nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision. Instead we get the climate deniers on one hand, who think that volume=debate, and people like you on the other hand, who stoop to insult and "just trust me, I'm a scientist" rhetoric on the other hand. You didn't even bother to ask me which side of the debate I support, before attacking my position and making an argument from the perceived authority of "tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers", none of which I have ever read or am capable of understanding.
For the record, I believe that we should be drastically reducing carbon emissions to mitigate any effect humans are having on the change in climate. I've been intentionally obfuscating this position because (1) climate debates on slashdot always devolve into Holy Wars, thanks to people like you and (2) my support for this position is based more on risk assessment and other incidental effects of reducing carbon dependence than it is on a true understanding of the core of the debate, and this makes me uncomfortable.
Re: (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
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You're attacking him, and yet, if anything, he implied that he might even agree with your view. And yet you completely missed his point.
First of all, yes, scientists do have PR departments. They're often called "media relations" or something of the sort, and most universities and independent research organizations have them. They're involved in publicizing the results of research, because the appearance of an article in what to many people is an obscure publication may otherwise go largely unnoticed. Ma
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're a law student, right? So when you come out of your cocoon and bloom into a full-fledged lawyer, will you explain every nuance of case research to your clients? Will you explain in excruciating detail the specifics of which laws apply? Will you explain the finest, tiniest aspect of how those laws are enforced? Will you, in short, force each and every one of your clients to have a law degree?
Or will you just give them an overview and expect that they rely on your expertise as a lawyer to cover the deta
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
"Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, ..."
Well, to be fair, there are idiots all over the political and ideological map. Sometimes they end up in your camp, sometimes in the other camp. You can't judge who's right by who's got more idiots on their side...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but the problem right now is that the idiots are running the asylum. Evaluating public debate in America basically amounts to trying to decide which camp of idiots is more likely to be right than the other camp. In the context of the climate change issue, failure to back the right camp of idiots will likely have disastrous consequences, as it's the idiots we back who are going to make policy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition to those two questions, factor in these other two questions:
What's the cost if we do something about it, but scientists were wrong (i.e. there isn't any real global warming, or at least human-caused warming) vs. the benefits of doing nothing in that case....
and
What's the cost if we do nothing about it, but scientists were right (i.e. human-caused global warming is quite real and accelerating), vs. the benfits of doing something in that case...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the cost of doing something about it (in terms of food production, delayed development, reduced energy availability) compared to the cost of not doing something about it (in terms of food production, lost occupied land, ecological diversity). It's those numbers that I've never seen realistically presented, and it's those numbers that should inform the decisions. Why don't we see those numbers? Because it's really really hard to figure them out, probably impossible with our current understanding of climate, geology, ecology, economics, and sociology.
One of my pet peeves is that those are political questions, not scientific questions. It's a legitimate position to say that we should do something even if the hypothesis might be wrong, but saying that we should do something does not equal scientific proof. This isn't directed specifically at you, nor am I saying whether the hypothesis is right or wrong, I'm only trying to point out that there should be a certain amount of seperation between the scientific and political parts of the discussion.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they're sure that the Earth has been warming up. What they are not so sure about is if humans have any meaningful impact on the warming or if it is just mostly the natural heat/cool cycle at work.
Given that where I live was under a glacier 11,000 years ago IMO a little extra help warming wouldn't hurt... a new ice age would be far more destructive to humans than a higher sea level due to warming.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
When you only look back a couple hundred years, the global warming figures look absolutely frightening. Go back about 1000 years and it doesn't look nearly as bad. Go back about 20,000 years and you start to wonder if we should be cranking up the global furnace as fast in order to make the next Ice Age, which is inevitable and devastating, not quite so bad. On that time scale the current warming trend is insignificant and irrelivant. How do you compare a change of less than a degree over the last 150 years (which was coming out of a mini-ice age) to fluctuations of 10-20 degrees over the course of a few hundred years which is what occurs in an Ice Age?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why the people who want to "DO SOMETHING!" to halt the Earth's natural warming process scare me more than anything else. If they should succeed in reducing the temperature by so much as half a degree, they could throw us into a new ice age (and do so very rapidly, as climate changes go), and it's quite possible that this could upset the cycle to the point that we never come back out of it.
Imagine a few years in a row like "the year without a summer" and wonder where you'll be growing crops sufficient
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I think that the Global Warming scare actually hurts the environmental movement. The theory got elevated to gospel, but there is still not enough evidence to prove human interference is the absolute cause. The fact of the matter is being more energy efficient is better for the Earth, the economy of the world, and quality of human life in general. Using Global Warming Armageddon to scare the masses into going green has not had the affect that was desired. People who were already green-minded just became
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>Given that where I live was under a glacier 11,000 years ago IMO a little extra help warming wouldn't hurt...
It might not have been that long ago. During the Mini-Ice Age from 1200-1850 the glaciers moved forward again, covering various places that are today dry.
Imagine if this were the year 1800, and the former Vice-president was warning us about global warming. Technically he would be right, but the warming wasn't humans fault. It was merely a natural cycle, and a return to the climate that
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The people who are not sure are not sure because they don't know enough to have confidence. Sadly these same people conveniently have assurance from other things to which they are ignorant. For some reason when a product of science may have a negative implication to the person, insecurity ensues...
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You hurt your cause by calling anyone who questions your conclusions "deniers." That is an immediate red flag for anyone with a skeptical bent.
Re:Hey, wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Local weather != global climate.
Remember, while you were shovelling 9 feet of snow, Vancouver had to truck it in for the Olympics and south Alaska was having record highs. (The usual Arctic wind that keeps those places cool got pushed south a lot.)
Admittedly, trying to justify it with everything that happens is moronic. Weather patterns are massively complex. In the end, what you have to look at is the year to year trend, and by that measure, 200X was the hottest decade on record.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Global warming means that the annual average temperature of the Earth is increasing, and not that local temperatures are necessarily increasing across the board.
The effect it does have on local weather patterns, is that it makes them more variable. So what a person will experience at a given location should be an increase in the frequency of strange weather patterns.
Also, no data or event on its own is proof of anything (except that the data was measured and that the event was observed to occur). They can b
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
HEY now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HEY now. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about "blame". It's about predicting what will happen if we engage in a particular activity. The warming due to humans burning fossil fuels was predicted over 100 years ago [wikipedia.org], and we're now observing that predicted warming. We now have confirmation that burning fossil fuels causes warming, so we know we can lessen the warming by burning fewer fossil fuels.
If you know that germs cause disease, you can improve sanitation and lessen disease. It has nothing to do with "blaming" germs!
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because islands can't lose land mass. The only reason islands are "created" or are "deleted" (hehe) is the sea level...
Plus, we all know that anything (read: including localized events) that COULD come from warming global temperatures is caused by "global warming" which is really AGW. On the other hand, any localized events that appear to contradict AGW are just localized events and can't enter into the debate.
Me? Cynical?
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Funny thing. The waters seem to rise and fall two times each day. I always thought the big circles in the sky had something to do with it.
Re:HEY now. (Score:5, Funny)
If you are going AFK to use Typing Tutor, we may have discovered your problem....
Children's Lesson (Score:2)
Haven't heard of Solomon's judgment? (Score:3)
*sigh* Dude, the correct answer is, "No, no! Let him have it! Please! Just don't destroy it! I love it too much!" Shame on India and Bengaladesh!
Everyone knows that [wikipedia.org] by now!
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.
Re:Wait - what? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons [wikipedia.org]. No one has ever said that the only way the climate can warm is due to humans burning fossil fuels. Deniers like to act as if AGW proponents have said that, however. 'Tis just a strawman.
Second, 20,000 years ago we didn't have over 100 million people living in cities near the ocean. Over the next century, these millions of people will be displaced, or the land they're on will be protected, at a cost of trillions of dollars [pbs.org]. If we can avoid it by spending much less money, say, only one trillion dollars, it makes economic sense to do so.
Spending a trillion dollars sounds almost scary, except when you put in into context of saving several trillion dollars.
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Increases in sea level are not new phenomena.
Neither are world wars or mass extinctions, but I think we should work to avoid those.
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Extinction of humanity sounds scary, except when you put it in context [wikipedia.org], species extinction is not a new phenomenon
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.
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Have you seen the moon recently? No? That's because it parked over the Bay of Bengal whislt it went into India for a quick curry, and someone clamped it for not obeying the laws of motion. The clamping company won't release the moon until the fine is paid, but the moon has no money to pay for its own release. So high tide is permanently over the Bay of Bengal now.
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Glenn Beck makes a visit to Slashdot?
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And Rachel Maddow posts here as "Sleepy."
Now, did you have a point to make, or is just being ridiculous enough for you today?
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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.
Super! (Score:2, Insightful)
See, we just need to understand that global climate change isn't good or bad. It's both. It solves problems and creates them. We just have to accept that it will happen, and continue to do whatever we're doing. No need to change anything, just ride out the changes. We can live without coral and fish. It'll be fine. Because now we have less land to fight over. Which will result in less conflict because we'll be able to peacefully come to agreements about how to divide the less amount of remaining lan
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.
Re:Rising sea level? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What they didn't mention was that the "point" in question was on top of a politician's head.
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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
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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.
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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
Next comes.... (Score:2, Funny)
If it is barely under water- call it Fiji. (Score:5, Funny)
Except it wasn't sea levels rising... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know OMFG global warming is hip and all, but this almost certainly wasn't a case of rising sea levels. Sea levels are rising REALLY slowly. That isn't to say that a big hunk of the antarctic couldn't melt and slide off into the ocean and give me some beach front property, just that it hasn't happened yet. The island almost certainly simply sunk into the ground. The earth sucks stuff down and pushes other stuff up all the time. It happens.
Leshp (Score:2)
If no one has done so yet, this story needs to be tagged "Leshp"
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.
I love how Global Warming has to be everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You pussy kids today (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Beautiful essay on eroding islands (Score:3, Informative)
This is pus... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the Wikipedia (I know) says New Moore Island was never higher [wikipedia.org] 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.
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.
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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:"Always attribute to global warming... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Know What Else Is Blatantly Obvious? (Score:2)
It's blatantly obvious, and I KNOW I can count on you to back me up on that. Power to the insightful, brother!
"Never let scientific evidence..." (Score:4, Funny)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go listen to Rush while I jerk off to a picture of Ann Coulter.
Re: (Score:2)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go listen to Rush while I jerk off to a picture of Ann Coulter.
Real Republicans [cnn.com] do it the other way around.
Re:"Never let scientific evidence..." (Score:5, Funny)
"...stand in the way of a good ad hominem. HAHA! Al Gore's fat!"
Hey! That's not an ad hominem attack! Observe:
insult - Al Gore is fat.
ad hominem - Al Gore is wrong because he's fat.
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.
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Attribute to plate tectonics? You mean the incredibly slow process whereby the continental plates move around? The process that's so slow that it couldn't make effects like this at the rate we're seeing? ... nah, you clearly mean some thing else that goes by the name plate tectonics. Sadly, I've never heard of another meaning. Please enlighten us?
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.
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