| « The sleeping giant Russia | The Ibiza Island, the night club capital » |
The Sinking Islands of Kiribati
By Nick on July 27, 2008
As an ESL teacher for ten years, I’ve gone through a lot of textbooks. Perhaps one of the most memorable articles I covered in an advanced level textbook was about the sinking islands of Kiribati.
Kiribati is a series of 32 atolls and one island in the tropical center of the Pacific Ocean. This picture shows Christmas Island.
Kiribati is home to over 100,000 people, but what you can see in the pictures above and below, is that the land they live on is sinking!
Rising sea levels are clearly the cause of the Kiribati’s plight, but it’s still uncertain whether or not CO² is responsible for global warming. In fact, rocket scientist and former carbon accountant for Australia’s Greenhouse Office has reversed his position, now arguing that CO² is only a minor cause of global warming.
If CO² is not the main cause of global warming, what can be done to save Kiribati? Despite a 2007 article in TIME magazine blindly labeling CO² as the cause, one researcher admitted,
You could cut off all CO² outputs and sea levels will continue to rise [for a century or more], because the oceans respond slowly to atmospheric change.
In that case, we are about to see the loss of “paradise on Earth”.
Learn more about Kiribati
Posted in World | 9 Comments
Possibly Related
- Here is Kiribati, Christmas Island or Kirimati.
- Phoenix Mars Lander Set for Touch Down
- This is about the Wallis and Futuna Islands in the South Pacific.
- Happy New Year 2009 from Virtual-Tripping!
- Learn about the Tuvalu or formerly known, Ellis Islands in the Pacific Ocean, Australiasia.
9 Responses to “The Sinking Islands of Kiribati”
« The sleeping giant Russia | Home | The Ibiza Island, the night club capital »
Mark Ramsay, globetrotting from an armchair in England.
7:38 pm on July 27th, 2008
I enjoyed te article, Nick, but it does seem we are wasting our time saving on CO2 emmissions
7:42 pm on July 27th, 2008
Hey Nick, i did not know that the islands were sinking but that has come to no surprise to me as i have heard that parts of the uk are sinking aswell, I think it is possibly to do with rising sea levels caused partly by the melting glaziers in the artic and in the antartic, but i may be wrong.
3:42 pm on August 16th, 2008
[...] few disgruntled, man-eating dinosaurs, that island would be paradise on Earth, well, at least after Kiribati has [...]
9:30 pm on January 11th, 2010
Nick, check out the book, “The Sex Lives of Cannibals,” by Maarten Troost. He and his wife spent 2 years on Tarawa, Kiribati. I think your opinion of Kiribati as a paradise will change after reading.
11:51 am on February 22nd, 2010
hey!!,
i did know that just search more for our research too..
is that so?
then fine.
11:21 pm on February 24th, 2010
Ok so the sea level is rising a little but aren’t atolls ancient sinking volcanoes where the coral has replaced the land. Seems inevitable that atolls will eventually sink into the depths…
1:41 pm on March 6th, 2010
These pictures of Kiritimati (Christmas Island) are very bad examples.
What you see on the Pictures is the effect of an raising (not an sinking) atoll. The big lagoon is partially drying out.
Check wiki for more details.
2:26 am on August 5th, 2010
Christmas Island is nowhere near Kiribati. It’s located in the Indian Ocean, 310miles off the coast of Java and 6000miles away from Kiribati. It’s a territory of Australia and definitely not sinking, and not an atoll either, but rather a top of an old volcano, rising some 13000feet from the ocean floor.
2:57 am on August 5th, 2010
Do some research Paavo and you’ll discover there is more than one “Christmas Island”.