[<<That entire stretch (in Sagar island in coastal West Bengal), where there were once houses and plots of agricultural land, has been swallowed up by the sea, including the house in which we had stayed. The couple who lived there have moved further inland. It’s getting increasingly difficult to find land to move inwards; many families are forced to leave. It’s affected the number of kids in the school. It used to have 250 students a few years ago. “We are now down to 140 students as families leave the island,” the teacher said. ... The reasons underlying this constant swallowing of land, homes and other structures by the sea are well known by now. Or should be. Over 90% of all the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases is taken up by ocean waters because of the greater capacity of water to absorb heat. Just the top layer of the oceans take up excess heat equal to 40 times the entire annual energy consumption of the United States. On an average, ocean waters worldwide have warmed by 0.4 degrees Celsius over the past 40 years. Warmer waters tend to rise, and hence keep advancing further up the slopes of seabeds. A second factor is ice melting from glaciers worldwide and the great ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica. These factors have caused sea level rise to occur at a little over 3 millimetres a year on average worldwide, but for reasons specific to its shape, this rise is much higher in the Sunderbans. And to this one must add the fact that the landmass in the delta itself has been subsiding at an average of 2.5 mm a year, as a paper published in Climatic Change in August last year stated. But sea level rise caused by global warming is getting more weighty as a factor here. But the key point is also this: what has befallen Boatkhali Kadambini Primary School is a warning for us all – in the near future, all structures, agricultural lands, and the millions of residents all along India’s 7,500 kilometre coastline will also be at heightened risk. ...>>]
https://thewire.in/203192/school-teaches-us-sea-level-rise/ What a School in Bengal Teaches Us About Sea Level Rise BY NAGRAJ ADVE ON 09/12/2017 There was a school on one edge of Sagar island in the Sunderbans in 2014; it is not there anymore. Today, sea water regularly comes in a hundred metres beyond the spot where the building stood. Snipped -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
