Climate Change - Oceania

Oceania is a region made up of thousands of islands throughout the Central and South Pacific Ocean. 

It includes Australia, the smallest continent in terms of total land area.

Many of the nations in Oceania are Small Island Developing States (SIDS).


Many scientists say that Oceania is more vulnerable than most parts of the Earth to climate change, because of its climate and geography. 

The heavily coastal populations of the continent’s small islands are vulnerable to flooding and erosion because of sea level rise. 

An international team of researchers has produced this graph of ocean levels, for a period of time going back to around 500 BC. 

Five of the Solomon Islands have been swallowed whole by rising sea levels between 1947 and 2014. 
"It’s a perfect storm,” says Simon Albert of the University of Queensland. “There’s the background level of global sea-level rise, and then the added pressure of a natural trade wind cycle that has been physically pushing water into the Western Pacific."
Albert and his colleagues analysed aerial and satellite images from 1947 to 2014 to study the effects of creeping sea levels on the coastlines of 33 reef islands in the Solomons.
Five islands present in 1947, ranging in size from 1 to 5 hectares, had completely disappeared by 2014.
Another six islands had shrunk by 20 to 62 per cent in the same period, confirming anecdotal reports of people living in the area.
Homes in Solomon Islands close to edge of sea
The most populated of these, Nuatambu Island, is home to 25 families, who have witnessed 11 houses wash into the sea since 2011.
Fiji’s shoreline has been receding about 15 centimetres per year over the last 90 years.

Samoa has lost about half a metre per year during that same time span. 

The global sea level graph is from this paper: 
"Temperature-driven global sea-level variability"

Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change - The link with mass extinctions

Image
What is the worst-case scenario for climate change? The geological record shows that when the atmosphere suddenly changes, there are big effects on living things. Five major  mass extinction  events are recorded in the rock record of the last 600 million years. The biggest extinction was at the end of the  Permian , around 252 million years ago. It is called the  End-Permian mass extinction. Only about 8% of species survived to live on in the Triassic Period. This photo shows geologists investigating tilted sedimentary rocks at Shangsi in South China. Triassic rocks (at the top right) lie over the older Permian rocks. Each mass extinction in the rocks matches with a change in the chemistry of the rocks called a ' carbon excursion '. Some of the carbon excursions are 'negative CEs' and some are 'positive CEs'. Negative CEs  indicate that lots of gaseous carbon compounds escaped into the air, causing warming. These are sometime...
Read more

Climate Change - The Greenhouse Effect

Image
What do scientists mean by the " Greenhouse Effect "? When the Sun's energy arrives at the Earth, it travels through the air. Some is reflected back to space, but some hits the Earth and warms it. The warm Earth gives off  infrared radiation  with various wavelengths.   Some of those waves can pass back out of the air to space, but some are absorbed by certain gases in the air. The gases then re-emit the energy into the air. If there are more of those gases, less heat escapes into space. An extreme case has happened on Venus. Concentrated  'greenhouse gases'  on Venus have caused the surface temperature to rise to 735  Kelvin  (462 degrees C; around 900 degrees F) Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen quickly  since people began burning large quantities of fossil fuels. There was carbon dioxide in the air before that, at around 270 parts per million. Without any carbon dioxide, the Earth wo...
Read more

Climate Change - Coal and carbon dioxide

Image
Coal, oil and natural gas are  fossil fuels . When they are burned, they  change the Earth's atmosphere. How is that possible?       C oal  is a good example. Coal was formed  hundreds of millions of years ago . Geologists say that a three-metre (10-foot) coal seam took between  12,000 and 60,000 years  to form . Ancient trees and other plants lived, died and were fossilised. All those plants took  carbon dioxide  out of the atmosphere.  Some larger coal seams are, for example, 10 metres thick. They took around  40,000 years to form,  but have been mined and burned in a little over  100 years. The fastest rise of CO 2  in the air seen in   the ice core record (800,000 years)  is  20 ppm in 1000 years. The CO 2  level in the atmosphere is now rising at around  20 ppm per decade . The  carbon  joins up with  oxygen  when it burns. Eac...
Read more