Years ago, the World Bank funded a drilling project in Bangladesh that created wells to access groundwater for irrigation. While this did temporarily help to fight off famine that ravaged the country, no one took into account the high levels of arsenic which are naturally present in some of Bangladesh’s groundwater. As a result, the sediment in surface water has become so polluted with this poison that the World Health Organization is calling the phenomenon the “world’s worst case of mass poisoning,” even worse than Chernobyl. Now, decades later, 70 million people in Bangladesh and India can consume extremely high levels of arsenic every time they eat rice, the region’s primary staple, or use water.

Scientists in the UK who have been monitoring this problem recently came up with a solution that might help put an end to the mass poisoning. Bhaskar Sen Gupta and his team of scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have developed a system of tube-wells that pump the groundwater to the surface into pools where it is exposed to oxygen and then after a few hours, as a result of this aeration, the arsenic naturally evaporates. After arsenic levels have sufficiently decreased, the water is pumped back underground to the wells. Dr. Gupta comments that “This project…is the only method which is eco-friendly, easy to use and deliverable to the rural community user at an affordable cost.”

The World Bank is providing funding for sustaining the water purification plants (which will be run by local villagers) and for the expansion of this program to other parts of Southeast Asia. Hopefully, levels of arsenic-related cancer cases will decrease and millions of people will be assured that their water and crops are arsenic-free.

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.