MOST OF us have not heard about Tuvalu. In fact, what importance can a sparsely populated island – the third least populated country in the world, with an economy that survives on subsistence farming, fishing and foreign aid with no natural resources, be of to the global community? Oblivious to the vast majority of the people on this planet, this tiny Polynesian island nation has succumbed to global warming, forcing evacuation of its inhabitants and creating the first global warming refugees of the world.
Tuvalu, with its four reef islands and five true atolls, lies on the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia. The rising sea level, the obvious outcome of global warming, is gradually engulfing this island nation. In the next 50 years, the country would completely disappear from the face of the earth. The highest point of the nation is only five meters above the sea level. 3000 Tuvaluans have already been evacuated and the remaining 8000 are waiting to leave the country, sometime in the near future. For the Tuvaluan refugees, challenges of settling in Australia and New Zealand are myriad. Tuvalu was a country where its inhabitants were used to live simple life in small islands with few cars, where locals spent most of the time barefoot on the sand, living in communities where during hot nights one can even sleep on a local airstrip. For these simple islanders, adjusting to large cities with their high-rises and highways is not easy. Nonetheless, Tuvaluans prefer to immigrate to the neighboring countries, as they notice the gradual environmental changes on their island. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has detected Tuvalu’s sea level rising at a rate of 5.5 millimeters every year, on par with average sea level rise worldwide.
The United Nations, under the Geneva Conventions, describes ‘a refugee, strictly as a person displaced from his or her homeland because of war or political persecution’. Lack of formal recognition of climate refugees has made Australia, reluctant to grant refugee status to the displaced Tuvaluans. However, the government of New Zealand had generously agreed to accept the climate refugees of Tuvalu, guaranteeing them residency, housing, counseling services and other benefits.
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The Arctic icecap is now shrinking at record rates in the winter as well as summer, adding to evidence of disastrous melting near the North Pole,
according to research by British scientists.
They have found that the widely reported summer shrinkage, which this year resulted in the opening of the Northwest Passage, is continuing in the winter months with the thickness of sea ice decreasing by a record 19% last winter.
Usually the Arctic icecap recedes in summer and then grows back in winter. These findings suggest the period in which the ice renews itself has become much shorter.
Katharine Giles, who led the study and is based at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), said the thickness of Arctic sea ice had shown a slow downward trend during the previous five winters but then accelerated.
She said: "After the summer 2007 record melting, the thickness of the winter ice also nose-dived. What is concerning is that sea ice is not just receding but it is also thinning."
The cause of the thinning is, however, potentially even more alarming. Giles found that the winter air temperatures in 2007 were cold enough that they could not have been the cause.
This suggests some other, longer-term change, such as a rise in water temperature or a change in ocean circulation that has brought warmer water under the ice.
If confirmed, this could mean that the Arctic is likely to melt much faster than had been thought. Some researchers say that the summer icecap could vanish within a decade.
The research, reported in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that last winter the average thickness of sea ice over the whole Arctic was 26cm (10%) less than the average thickness of the previous five winters.
However, sea ice in the western Arctic lost about 49cm of thickness.
This region saw the Northwest Passage become ice-free and open to shipping for the first time in 30 years during the summer of 2007.
The UCL researchers used satellites to measure sea-ice thickness from 2002 to 2008. Winter sea ice in the Arctic is about 8ft thick on average.
The team is the first to measure ice thickness throughout the winter, from October to March, over more than half of the Arctic, using the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.
Giles's findings confirm the more detailed work of Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, who has undertaken six voyages under the icecap in Royal Navy nuclear submarines since 1976 and has gathered data from six more voyages.
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