According to the Discovery News, recent satellite measurements found that Venice, Italy, was sinking at a faster rate than expected. The city is subsiding 2 mm each year, but with the Adriatic Sea level rising 2 mm each year simultaneously, the over-all subsidization of Venice per year is 8mm.
“It’s a small effect, but it’s important,” said Yehuda Bock, a geodesist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the University of California, San Diego.
Unfortunately, Venice is not the only city that is sinking as a result of global warming. The United Nations predicts that sea levels will rise by 28 cm to 58 cm by the end of the century and warns that the island nations are “particularly vulnerable to climate change. These nations’ limited sizes make them more prone to natural hazards and external shocks, in particular due to rises in sea level and threats to their freshwater resources.”
The Maldives, a nation consisting of around 1190 coral islands in the Indian Ocean, is one of the most vulnerable nations. There is no point of the island that is higher than 2 meters above the sea level, and the sea level rises more rapidly in this region than in most parts of the world due to the increased frequency of storms. In 50 years, the Maldives will likely be underwater along with other island nations, such as The Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu.
To make the matter worse, residents of sinking nations currently have no place to go when their habitats sink. In a preparation for a seemingly imminent disaster, Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed has been making countless efforts to relocate the residents to neighboring countries, such as India, but none of these efforts have been successful.
“The Maldives is on the climate change front line, but what happens in the Maldives today happens to the rest of the world tomorrow,” said Nasheed.
Kiribati currently is negotiating a land purchase from Fiji to provide its citizens with new homes, but neither side has found a suitable solution for the problem.
i liked your topic and thought you wrote very well but think you could have a lot more variety with the quotes? especially in situations like these some quotes can give a lot of impact to the story (a story about the sinking is good, but a story including how the sinking is impacting PEOPLE is awesomesauce)
otherwise tres bien! i had no idea this was happening (qq worried)