Tsunami Effects Threaten Maldive Islands - Some Rendered "Uninhabitable"

[hatrack]

MALE, Maldives — The tidal waves that swept across the Indian Ocean did more than take a heavy toll of lives and property in the Maldives -- it confronted the tiny island nation with a threat to its survival. The archipelago of 1,190 low-lying coral islands, dotted across hundreds of kilometers (miles) of ocean, has for years begged bigger, more powerful nations for action against global warming, fearing higher sea levels could literally make much of its territory disappear.

The speeding walls of water that slammed into 11 nations in Asia and Africa on Sunday, killing tens of thousands of people, marked a brutal demonstration of vulnerability. "We are the world's lowest-lying country," said Mohammed Zahir, one of the country's leading environmentalists. "The average height of our islands is one meter (three feet)."

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Shaheed estimated the economic cost of the disaster at hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. The Maldives's annual gross domestic product is US$660 million (euro488 million). "It won't be surprising if the cost exceeds our GDP," Shaheed said. "In the last few years, we made great progress in our standard of living -- the United Nations recognized this. Now we see this can disappear in a few days, a few minutes."

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Waves a meter or more high swept completely across many islands. They extended over as much as half of Male, a relatively large island of 1.75 square kilometers,(0.7 square mile) pouring down the narrow, sandy streets and dashing against buildings including the president's office. Kandolhudhoo, an island of 3,500 people in the northern atoll of Raa which had spent US$ million dollars on land reclamation over the past five years, was "uninhabitable" after being completely covered by water, Assistant Island Chief Mohammed Ali Fulhu told the Haveeru newspaper. Residents were evacuated. Rather than trying to rebuild their island, the people would probably have to start new lives elsewhere, Fulhu said."

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http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=681

[ret5hd]

1. Don't worry...

the world bank and/or IMF will give you a loan, provided you sign these simple papers that give everything in your country away to the multinationals

[NMDemDist2]

2. for the lowlying island nations, fresh water is the biggest need

having all your freshwater sources overrun with sea water is devastating to say the least

it may be years before some of these islands are habitable again (if ever)

http://www.adb.org/Documents/Periodicals/ADB_Review/2003/vol35_1/water_islands.asp

[hatrack]

4. Big, big water problems coming

As I understand it, atolls like the Maldives contain fresh groundwater in a shallow lens just below ground level - rainwater that's seeped into the subsoil.

So, toss a few million cubic meters of seawater on top of a smallish island's water supply, and I'd be willing to bet that bad things are going to happen.

[rabid_nerd]

3. Crap.. most of my website traffic comes from there...

I get tens of thousands of visitors a month from Male forecasts...

http://www.visitmaldives.com links to me...

So I threw up some links on my site:

http://www.dynaweather.com/hw3.cgi?forecast=zandh&pands=VRMM