Changing Tidal Patterns, Continuing Seawater Rise Press Island Nations

[hatrack]

FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu (AP) — "The rising sea is eating at the shores of low-slung Funafuti, a spit of coral and coconut palms in the remote Pacific. Unseen fingers of ocean even reach beneath the sands, surfacing inland in startling places, among nervous islanders.
"It used to be puddles. Now it's like lakes," said Hilia Vavae, local meteorologist.

Far to the north in the Marshall Islands, 1,250 miles away, trees are toppling before aquamarine waves. Watching, perplexed, from the edge of a lagoon, teenager Ankit Stephen asked a visitor, "Why is this happening?" Six hundred miles west, on tiny Kosrae, Alokoa Talley pondered the same question. Neighbors are moving their homes up the lush slopes, away from the encroaching Pacific. "I don't know," the government worker said, "but I think it's because of 'green' something."

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The Malies and others along Funafuti's fringe have little room to maneuver. Just 300 yards from their rear doors, the choppy waters of the 9-mile-wide lagoon are rising. In between sit other salt-caked plywood or cinderblock houses, beside gaping pits dug in the island's coral foundation long ago, by U.S. troops in World War II. Those pits, filling now with seeping seawater, supplied the crushed material for Funafuti's airport, where today some of Vavae's "lakes" have begun to appear at peak tides. "People got especially worried when the runway flooded. That's new," Margaret Bita, 45, told a visiting reporter after Sunday church services.

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As recently as the 1980s, Vavae said, the peak king tides came only in January and February. Now, she said, they crash ashore from September to May. But it's the quiet seepage from below that most alarms Tuvaluans. Because of intruding saltwater, many have abandoned their gardens of deep-rooted "pulaka," a tuber crop grown in pits here for centuries. On the nearby islet of Vasafua, the coconut trees are dying. Another small uninhabited island, Tepuka Savilivili, has vanished beneath the waves. "It went under water in the cyclone in 1997," Vavae said.

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In Kiribati, another mini-state north of Tuvalu, they've also lost an islet in the main atoll of Tarawa. On Majuro, the Marshalls' capital, the lagoon outside Ankit Stephen's home has undercut dozens of towering coconut palms, as islanders futilely try to stop the waves with piles of debris. On Kosrae, a "high island" of volcanic peaks in the Federated States of Micronesia, the people have always lived along a flat coastal strip, but some are now dismantling their simple homes and heading for the hills, as recommended by the government. "Nobody remembers such tides before. The sea is actually moving inland," said Simpson Abraham, head of Kosrae's Resources Development Authority. Some offshore islets have vanished, he said."

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http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2004-05-22-climate-change_x.htm

[Village Idiot]

1. Move along....nothing to see here.....

[donsu]

2. tick, tick, tick

nt