About Paul's suggestion that the Maldives are sinking, instead of the water
rising:
 
My son has a friend who has been visiting and studying (something or
other!) on the island of Sri Lanka, which is in the Indian Ocean, like the
Maldives, but just about 400 miles northeast of them. The friend was
telling us that Sri Lanka is having problems with flooding also, but he did
call it sinkage, not rising seas. Which made me think on this.
 
 Looking at my National Geographic Atlas  when I should have been
proofreading American Conchologist copy for a Monday deaadline, I found:
The Maldives are part of the Chagos-Laccadive Plateau, which is an
elongate, mostly submerged  landmass,  which was created by a long-dead
volcano. The plateau supports a north-south chain of over a thousand coral
islands and atolls which runs parallel to the Chagos Trench to the east.
This landmass connects with India's continental shelf about midway up the
western coast of the Indian peninsula ( which is known as the Deccan
Plateau). So it could be that they are all one plateau in geologic history,
interconnected.
 
Sri Lanka, which is also experiencing rising water, is a part of that
Deccan Plateau which has been cut off by water (the Palk Strait). Is  the
whole Indian subcontinent sinking? Or could it be that the tectonic plate
on which India and the Maldives and Sri Lanka all sit is subsuming beneath
the plate to the west?  Or east?  We know that the Indian plate continues
to push northward into the underbelly of India, forcing the Himalayas ever
higher.  So it's not likely that India is sinking, unless it is a case of
some little subplate doing so. (Or unless it is India that is creeping
beneath Asia????)
 
But there's that Chagos Trench. Could the Maldives be sort of sliding down
into the trench at a very slow rate?  I don't think that area is very
geologically active, from what my maps indicate. Does anyone know more
about this? It unsettles me to think of an entire and very beautiful island
group simply sinking at a measurable rate.
 
Whoops!  Well, that was a fun exercice with the maps, but Paul and I are
the ones who are sinking. I just went surfing on the subject, (anything to
avoid real work!) and waded onto the following website:
 
http://www.outthere.co.za/jun97/ecojun.html
 
Mark had it right. The Maldives are indeed victims of rising water. . .
higher sea levels,  and salted up aquifers . . .a consequence of global
warming, and since the entire landmass (300 sq. km.) is nowhere higher that
3 meters above sea level and most of it is only 1 meter above sealevel, the
entire nation is threatened by global warming.
 
"Latest estimates forecast a temperature increase of two deg C by the year
2100, with a corresponding rise in sea level of just under half a metre (as
glaciers and ice caps melt and thermal expansion of seawater occurs).
Predictions that the frequency and intensity of storms will  in-crease as
the world warms, mean that it is possible the island  kingdom may be swept
away through flooding and erosion within 50 years. The Maldives is, in the
words of its President, Mr Maumoon Abdul Gayoom,'an endangered country'. "
 
Go read about it. I'm going for my boots and pontoon boat.
 
Lynn Scheu
Louisville, KY, Host City of the 1999 COA Convention
"Louisville, Your Kind of Place!"
-- Where rising sea level will make it possible to water ski on the Ohio in
 the lobby of our convention hotel next June if we don't quit heating up
the planet.
 
 
>How can the sea rise over time in one isolated area?  If the Maldives are the
>only place noting such a change, I'd wonder if the Maldives might be sinking,
>rather than the sea rising.
>Paul M.
>
>