Rising Sea Levels:
A study has projected that sea levels will rise around Lakshadweep Islands due to the impact of global warming.
- It will affect airport and residential areas that are quite close to the present coastline.
India’s smallest Union Territory, Lakshadweep is an archipelago consisting of 36 islands with an area of 32 sq km. - SLR is an increase in the level of the world’s oceans due to the effects of climate change, especially global warming, induced by three primary factors: Thermal Expansion, Melting Glaciers, and Loss of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets.
- Sea level is primarily measured using tide stations and satellite laser altimeters.
- The global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has accelerated in recent decades. The average global sea level has risen 8.9 inches between 1880 and 2015. That’s much faster than in the previous 2,700 years.
- Also, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released ‘The Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate’ in 2019 which underlined the dire changes taking place in oceans, glaciers, and ice-deposits on land and sea.
- SLR is not uniform across the world. Regional SLR may be higher or lower than Global SLR due to subsidence, upstream flood control, erosion, regional ocean currents, variations in land height, and compressive weight of Ice Age glaciers.
