Remember this movie? Fifteen years ago, when Waterworld first came out, the concept of melting icecaps and land being swallowed by water seemed laughable to some of us. It is still a wild overstatement to say that we’re going to need the survival skills of Kevin Costner to adjust to climate change, but the BBC recently reported that one piece of land has in fact vanished thanks to rising sea levels. An island in the Bay of Bengal near India and Bangladesh, once a point of contention between the two states, has now come under water. New Moore Island to Indians and South Talpatti to the Bangladeshis, just six feet high and uninhabited, was significant to these nations because of the oil or natural gas that might lie beneath it. Now global climate change has solved the territorial dispute for good.

This incident’s importance should not be underestimated. Bangladesh certainly has cause for concern, considering the fact that-according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change- 17% of the nation will vanish under water by 2050 and 20 million people will be displaced. If scientists’ claim that unhealthy amounts of carbon emissions cause sea levels to rise is true, then this island’s disappearance should be an alarming wake up call.

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