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Rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands are disturbing the dead as well as the living

The Wire reported yesterday that rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands are disturbing the dead as well as the living.

According to the article, Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, recently announced that 26 skeletons of World War Two soldiers have washed up. Rising sea levels have caused the graves to become exposed. The bodies are believed to be those of Japanese soldiers.
The Marshall Islands are particularly precarious in their perch; the nation, made up of 29 atolls, is roughly just six feet above sea level. With sea levels predicted to rise by three-to-six feet by the end of the century, the alarm is obviously growing. 

The Marshall Islands are a prime example of the damages global warming can cause. As our world becomes warmer, ice caps melt and sea levels rise, causing extreme damage to low-lying countries such as the Marshall Islands. In the same article, Marshall Islands President Christopher Loeak described how the beaches where he fished as a child have vanished and how the country's roads are being moved inland. 
“The island is not only getting narrower, it is getting shorter"

BBC News also covers the story, explaining what rising sea levels mean for the shrinking islands. "The waters are not just threatening to overwhelm their defences, they are eroding roads while the salt makes the land infertile." Going into the possible damages to the Marshall Islands in more detail, the BBC further explains:
"According to a recent report from the UN Environment Programme, sea level is rising in the Pacific around the Marshall's at a much higher rate than elsewhere in the world. The rate of rise between 1993 and 2009 was 12mm per year, compared with the global average of 3.2mm."

If sea levels do rise three to six feet in the coming century, the Marshall Islands will become uninhabitable and perhaps even disappear altogether. A beautiful and nearly unique world, a place people have called home for many years, destroyed due to what humanity has done to a once beautiful and undamaged world. Shame on us. 

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