India & Bangladesh will fight no longer over an island in the Bay of Bengal.The rising ocean level, as a result of global warming, has sunk it beneath the waves, like the legendary Atlantis of ancient times.
Even though war has been avoided this time, the effects of the rising oceans in the future, because it will cause mass migrations, may lead to conflicts or even wars.
The scientists in India report:
(BBC). There are populated islands that face the same fate, some of which have governments who know how to make the point.
The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.
Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.
Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.
We really do not know if we can stop the rise of ocean levels, but we know that if we do not it will destroy what we call world civilization.
Billions of people will live on into the post-civilization world, with oral tales of lands that sank below the sea.
UPDATE: The first inhabited island has now gone under as a result of global warming induced ocean rise:
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.(Climaction, see also this and this). We can't call it apocalyptic predictions anymore, it should now be referred to as history and history still in the making.
