Many believe that the rise in sea levels caused by global warming will be truly felt only by our descendants. Nevertheless, Australian experts say that it is necessary to sound the alarm now.
Melting ice has led to the disappearance of part of the Solomon Islands in Melanesia over the past seven decades. Five small, uninhabited islets in the Southwest Pacific Ocean are completely submerged.
According to scientists, this event is a wake-up call not only for the archipelago itself, but also for the vast majority of coastal cities around the globe. Researchers at the University of Queensland in the Australian state of Tasmania have found that sea levels near the Solomon Islands have risen by about a centimeter per year over the past twenty years. As you know, in different parts of the oceans, the water level rises in its own way, and the inhabitants of the Melanesian state, apparently, were among those who were least fortunate.
Islanders are already suffering
After analyzing satellite photographs taken between 1946 and 2016, the researchers determined that five islands with a total area of five to twenty hectares during this time period were completely swallowed up by the ocean. None of the people lived there, so the event, which stretched out for several decades, was unnoticed by the world community. However, the water also covered about thirty percent of the six nearby islands where people are. Since 2010, twenty-five families have lost their homes, since it has become impossible to live in houses where water is already approaching the very threshold.
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Not a single person was injured from the flooding, but those animals that cannot swim and fly died as the islands slowly plunged into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Among them were representatives of rare and endangered endemic species. However, local authorities are in no hurry to help even people, let alone animals. The citizens of the Solomon Islands, left homeless as a result of the rise in the Pacific Ocean level, have been trying for many years to extract compensation from officials, but the government is in no hurry to solve the problems of their compatriots.
Island states suffer the most from sea level rise. International scientists have calculated that if the water rises another two hundred millimeters, all residents of the state of Tuvalu and about seventy thousand residents of the Maldives will be left homeless. In the long term, these countries will either have to succumb to the elements and disappear over time, or start erecting costly fences to trap water.