The Pacific islands: Sea change

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

LEADERS of Pacific nations are gathering on September 3rd-6th in Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, for the annual summit of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Their host, President Christopher Loeak, has been drumming up support for a “Majuro declaration” on climate change. He says his country, a group of 29 low-lying atolls and coral islands with 54,000 inhabitants, is particularly vulnerable to a rise in sea levels. Mr Loeak says that months of severe drought in the northern part of the Marshalls this year, and higher than usual tides that breached sea walls and washed across Majuro’s airport runway in June, are the result of global warming.

The Marshall Islands is no stranger to man-made environmental catastrophe. Over the course of a decade after the second world war, America conducted scores of mainly secret nuclear tests on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls, in the northern part of the group. Bikini and neighbouring Rongelap remain uninhabitable. All the country’s islands, like those of neighbouring Kiribati and Tuvalu, lie only a few metres above sea level, and could be engulfed by rising oceans.

The evidence for sea-level rise is strong. Tidal gauges suggest that the world’s oceans have risen by 1.77 millimetres a year since 1950. Satellite evidence points to around double that rate in the western Pacific Ocean over the past two decades. Measurements from Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, indicate an increase of 5 millimetres a year over the past 60 years.

Identifying the impact of sea-level rise is not straightforward. El Niño, a weather pattern which causes the equatorial Pacific’s warmer waters to flow east, can trigger floods and droughts across the region that affect sea levels as well. Severe floods in Papua New Guinea’s Carteret islands are often attributed to shifting sea levels, generating fears that they may produce the world’s first climate-change refugees. But plate tectonics may be driving the changes there, as John Connell of Sydney University argues in a recent book, “Islands at Risk”.

For now the real climate-change refugees may be living not above sea level but below it. Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that, since 1970, stocks of some fish species have gradually been moving towards the world’s colder regions (see article). In the Pacific Ocean some marine creatures are moving southward towards Antarctica at an average 7km (4.4 miles) a year, which may well affect the peoples of the tropical Pacific. The world’s fish stocks, it seems, are heralding a migration that may one day occur above the seas too.

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