Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time
washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration
of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges
and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the
moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of
environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations,
from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of
countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of
coastal cities.
Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on
Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of
Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands
in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution,
but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara,
once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece
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