Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies Read Online Free PDF Page A

seasons and the tides.
    New Moore could hardly have chosen a more delicate spot in which to take residence, since the Hariabhanga River from which it sprang forms the border between India and Bangladesh. As soon as it crested the water, both countries claimed it as their own, each giving it a different name. For the Indians it was New Moore Island, which remains its most commonly used name, but for the Bangladeshis it is South Talpatti. Either way it was a rich prize. India and Bangladesh have overlapping claims on the Bay of Bengal and its oil and gas reserves. Being able to claim a new island so far out to sea would allow one of them to extend its territorial waters over lucrative seabed.
    As a signal of intent, the Indian Border Security Force installed a billboard on the island in 1978, complete with a map of India and a picture of the Indian flag. The Indians raised the temperature again in May 1981 when they temporarily stationed troops on the island and ran a real flag up a real flagpole. For a while the question of which country this sandy speck belonged to looked as if it might lead to a serious conflict. Both sides, however, hoped that the conclusive shots would come from independent boundary experts. Those experts were tasked with determining how the waters of the Hariabhanga flowed around the island. This arcane information could have been decisive if it could have pinpointed the river’s
thalweg
, a German word used in boundary disputes involving rivers that refers to the line of a river’s lowest, and hence middle, flow. If the
thalweg
was to the east of the island, then it was India’s; if it was west of the island, it belonged to Bangladesh.
    As it was, the
thalweg
proved hard to determine, and delays set in. But before the problem was sorted out, New Moore began to disappear, and in March 2010 it was fully submerged. The last photograph of the young island shows the topmost branches of drowned trees clawing the waters.
    Rising sea levels are creating new shorelines at a rate that is outstripping governments’ abilities to respond. Since 2000 the waters of the Bay of Bengal, which were already rising, have been getting higher, quicker. The bay now sees a rise of about five millimeters a year. In a low-lying region, subject to sudden inundations, that’s a significant increase. For some, New Moore looked like a political problem caused by nature and solved by climate change. The
Christian Science Monitor
ran the story as “Global Warming as Peacemaker.” In fact, separating out what is natural about either the rise or the fall of New Moore isn’t that easy. Only one of the contributing factors falls simply into the category of “natural”: the sinking of a tectonic plate. This subsidence is gradually lowering the land under and around the Bay of Bengal and increasing sea levels in the process.
    And climate change is making the situation worse, not better. It can be blamed not only for accelerating the cycle of creation and destruction but also for the severity of recent floods. The increased rainfall that created the swollen rivers that, in turn, gave birth to New Moore was the direct result of the warmer seas caused by climate change. Road-building upstream also contributed to New Moore’s creation, by triggering landslides that added huge loads of sediment to the river. Unfortunately, deforestation across the region, especially the axing of mangrove trees along the coast, meant that the new sediment did not sink at the shoreline and help defend the coastline but instead was carried far out to sea.
    New Moore is not the only island that has come and gone in the Bay of Bengal. On the Indian side at least four other islands have emerged and then vanished. One of these, Lohachara, had a population of six thousand before it went under in 2006. Recently it has been spotted rising again. It seems that neither the appearance nor disappearance of these islands is a one-off event. They are rising and falling