Indian Ocean levels rising, study shows
Boulder, Colo. (UPI) Jul 15, 2010 – Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly, posing a threat to residents in some densely populated coastal areas and islands, a new study says. The study, led by researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, attributes the sea-level rise in part to climate change. Along the coasts of the northern Indian Ocean, seas have risen by an average of about 0.5 inches a decade, the research shows. The increases are particularly noted along the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java. Such rises in sea level could aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India, the study says, and could impact global climate change on both regional and global levels. … “Our new results show that human-caused changes of atmospheric and oceanic circulation over the Indian Ocean region — which have not been studied previously — are the major cause for the regional variability of sea level change,” the authors wrote in Nature Geoscience magazine. …
