British Prime Minister David Cameron's government announced the creation of the world’s largest contiguous ocean reserve on Wednesday, setting aside 322,000 square miles (830,000 square kilometers) around the remote Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific for special protection.
The new reserve is nearly three and a half times bigger than the
landmass of the United Kingdom—larger than the state of California—and
is home to a stunning array of sharks, fish, corals, and other marine
life, says Enric Sala, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who led a five-week Pristine Seas expedition to the island group in March 2012 that helped establish a scientific case for the reserve.
The Titan triggerfish, a voracious predator, being cleaned by a cleaner wrasse. Photograph by Enric Sala, National Geographic
Announced via the government's 2015 budget, the reserve represents a bid by the U.K. to thwart the illegal fishing that threatens the species in its territorial waters.
No fishing or seafloor mining will be allowed in the reserve, except for traditional fishing around the island
of Pitcairn by the local population, says Sala.
The reserve's creation is dependent on partnerships with
non-governmental organizations and satellite monitoring resources,
according to the budget.
Those resources are already in place, says
Sala.
Thirty percent of the U.K.’s waters around the world are now
protected, the highest percentage of any country’s waters on Earth.
Although the new reserve will become the largest single marine protected
area anywhere, the network of reserves
created around the Pacific remote islands by the U.S. in September is
bigger in total, at nearly 490,000 square miles (1,270,000 square
kilometers).
(Learn about how large marine reserves are protected.)
In 2012 National Geographic's Pristine Seas project went on an
expedition to the Pitcairn Islands—a legendary and remote archipelago in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean—and returned with footage of incredible
natural wonders underwater and on land. The expedition led to the
historic announcement that the British government has created the
largest contiguous marine reserve in the world, protecting this
one-of-a-kind ecosystem.
Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve
The Pitcairn Islands are some of the most
remote on Earth.
The surrounding waters contain intact deep-sea
ecosystems, and their coral reefs harbor abundant sharks and large
fishes.
In March 2015 the U.K. government established the area as a
no-take marine reserve—the largest single reserve in the world.
“People know Pitcairn because of the Mutiny on the Bounty, but their real bounty is the rich marine life underwater,” says Sala.
About 60 people live on Pitcairn Island, most of them descendants of
the Bounty mutineers from 1790 and their Tahitian companions.
In
September 2012, in response to the expedition, the Pitcairn Council
voted unanimously to create a marine protected area in their entire
economic zone, which extends 200 miles (322 kilometers) out from their
four islands, three of which are uninhabited. Since the islands are
administered by the U.K. as a territory, the new reserve required the
support of the British government.
“Pitcairn’s waters contain some of the few pristine coral reefs
left on the planet,” says Sala. “They also contain intact seamounts
[submerged mountains] and deep-sea habitats that have not been touched
by trawling and which harbor many species yet to be discovered by
science.”
On the 2012 expedition, Sala and his team discovered several new
species of fish by dropping cameras into deep water. A larger effort is
likely to discover hundreds of new animals there, he says.
“The Pitcairn Islands have some of the cleanest waters in the world,”
Sala says. “And Ducie Atoll is as pristine as it gets,” he added,
referring to the most remote of the islands.
Sala's dive team could see for 250 feet (75 meters) and spied many
sharks and a vast garden of pale blue coral that looked like giant
roses.
Pitcairn’s residents asked the U.K. government to create the reserve to thwart illegal fishing
from foreign fleets, which have been encroaching on their territory. Around the neighboring islands of French Polynesia, many of the sharks
have been fished out. By protecting its natural resources, Pitcairn
islanders also hope to attract higher numbers of tourists. (Learn how drones fight illegal fishing.)
Sala calls Pitcairn “one of the best-kept secrets of the U.K.” To get
there from Washington, D.C., takes five days on boats and airplanes. “That’s longer than it takes to get to the moon, but it was worth the
trip,” he says.
Pristine Seas Project
Completed expeditions (in blue) / Protected areas(in green)
Only about one percent of the world’s ocean is
protected in reserves that ban fishing. “There is an urgent need," Sala
says, "to protect such representative examples of ocean ecosystems.” Links :
BBC : Budget 2015: Pitcairn Islands get huge marine reserve
The Guardian : Pitcairn Islands to get world's largest single marine reserve
The Telegraph : Why will nobody move to Pitcairn, the Pacific island with free land?
The Pew : Pew, National Geographic applaud creation of Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve
NOAA survey ships and the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy are coordinating transits to and from the Arctic, to collect depth measurements along the proposed shipping corridor.
Coordinating with Coast Guard for safe shipping route from Unimark Pass through Bering Strait
As commercial shipping traffic increases in the Arctic,
NOAA is taking major steps to update nautical charts in the region.
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey will use data collected by two of its own ships, Rainier and Fairweather, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy
and a private sector hydrographic contractor to cover nearly 12,000
nautical miles in the Arctic for use in updating its navigational
charts.
The NOAA-led Arctic marine corridor project will
work with the Coast Guard to asses the safety of a potential Arctic
shipping route from Unimak Island, the largest of the Aleutian Islands,
through the Bering Strait to the Chukchi Sea, as proposed in the USCG Port Access Route Study for the region. The Coast Guard will continue to take public comments prior to making a final decision on the proposed route.
“Much of our charting data in this corridor is from
surveys conducted a hundred years ago,” said Rear Admiral Gerd Glang,
director of NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey.
“So right now, we need to
conduct reconnaissance of the seafloor in high traffic areas to make
sure they are safe for navigation.”
Over the past several years, Healy has been
collecting multibeam echo sounder depth data while travelling to and
from its Arctic research projects.
NOAA has reviewed the data, archived
at NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, and has found they are reliable and can support nautical charting.
Last year, Healy worked with Coast Survey to take
depth measurements as “tracklines”-- straight paths of transit -- while
at sea.
The survey is basing its new work on Healy’s 2014 trackline, along with data collected from 16 transits by the three ships and contractor vessel in 2015, using multibeam sonar.
The ships will survey depths in lines that are about a thousand meters
apart and a thousand meters wide, as they travel back and forth to major
project areas around the Bering Strait and the Arctic.
Altogether, the ships will collect about 12,000
nautical miles of data along the four nautical mile wide corridor.
In
addition to measuring depths, they will search for seamounts and other
underwater dangers to navigation.
Although Healy’s primary mission is
not hydrography, Coast Survey can use Healy’s data to identify
significant differences from current nautical charts, and prioritize
future NOAA hydrographic surveying efforts.
Other work planned for this summer includes joint hydrographic surveys by Rainier and Fairweather in the largely uncharted areas of Kotzebue Sound.
In addition, Rainier
will survey off Point Hope, Alaska, to evaluate a potential shoal area
discovered by NOAA cartographers and researchers using commercial
satellite imagery. Fairweather is scheduled to survey Port Clarence, a key Bering Strait location that is of potential interest as an Arctic deepwater port.
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, originally formed by
President Thomas Jefferson in 1807, maintains the nation’s nautical
charts, surveys the coastal seafloor, responds to national maritime
emergencies, and searches for underwater obstructions and wreckage.
NOAA ships Fairweather and Rainier
are part of the NOAA fleet of research ships operated, managed, and
maintained by NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which
includes commissioned officers of the NOAA Corps, one of the seven
uniformed services of the United States, and civilian wage mariners.
People in the Pacific Marshall Islands and Kiribati are facing oblivion
as the sea around them rises, and they are already suffering from food
shortages, droughts and floods. Karl Mathiesen reports from the
frontline of climate crisis
In 1946 an American commodore gathered Lirok Joash and her people
together and asked them to temporarily leave their homes on Bikini
Atoll.
The US needed somewhere to test its atomic bombs.
It would be,
said the navy man, “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars”.
Eight years later US scientists detonated Castle Bravo,
the massive, bungled hydrogen bomb that would gouge a crater more than
half a mile wide and make Bikini uninhabitable for decades, perhaps
centuries.
A calculating error created a blast equivalent to detonating
15 megatonnes of TNT, the bomb was the largest ever detonated by the
United States – about 1,000 times larger than the bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.
In 1954 the US detonated Castle Bravo - the most powerful nuclear device
ever detonated by the US – on Bikini Atoll.
Photograph: US Air Force -
digital version c/US Air Force
Joash was 20-years-old when she left Bikini.
She has been forced to
relocate by radiation or unsuitable living conditions five times –
including a brief and disastrous return to a still radioactive Bikini in
the 1970s.
Now, at 89, she is the oldest of the Bikini population
forced to move by the nuclear tests.
Her memories of the atoll have now
grown dim.
“I don’t think she’ll make it until the next return,” says Joash’s
grandson Alson Kelen, a former mayor of the Bikinian council-in-exile.
“I don’t think I’ll make it. I don’t think my children or my
grandchildren will make it. The dream that we would return already faded
away a few years ago.”
High tide completely surrounds Eita, South Tarawa.
If the seas continue
to rise at the current rate, it won’t be long before the villagers will
have to relocate, as many have already done.
Photograph: Rémi Chauvin
for The Guardian
The Bikinians, most of whom will never see Bikini, live scattered across the Marshall Islands,
a collection of 24 atolls in the Western Pacific.
Joash, Kelen and 200
of their people now live on Ejit, a tiny low-lying islet set aside for
the Bikinians near the Marshall Islands’ capital atoll Majuro.
“We’ve been kicked around for a while, for the last almost 70 years,”
says Kelen.
“And until now living in these tight communities here is
the best we can get. And it’s so sad. It’s so sad. Because every time we
look at this we feel like we’re sailors on a voyage, we’re still right
in the middle of the ocean.”
And the ocean, driven by climate change, is rising.
Across the Pacific, the subtle, unremitting first impacts of the climate crisis are already strangling lives. Later this year in Paris, the world’s leaders will attempt to produce an agreement that will secure the global climate.
But secure for whom?
Floods washed over Ejit three times in 2014.
Kelen fears that before long, his people will be moving again.
“It’s the same story. Nuclear time, we were relocated. Climate change, we will be relocated. It’s the same harshness affecting us,” he says.
In the Marshall Islands almost everyone lives within a few hundred
metres of the sea and less than three metres above it.
Inundations have
destroyed homes and crops.
Droughts of extraordinary intensity and
length have necessitated food and water drops.
Fresh water grows
scarcer.
People are trying to defend their land by planting mangroves, and
Sisyphean sea walls are built and rebuilt.
But people’s thoughts are
turning from adaptation and resilience toward a climate exodus.
Scientists predict that in 30 years, life here will be so uncomfortable
most people will leave.
A notion the Marshallese abhor.
The Bikinian
calamity serves as a national warning that homelands, once lost, cannot
be replaced.
“If the land doesn’t exist, what happens to these people for whom the
land is the most integral thing? For the answer, just look at the
Bikinians,” says Jack Niedenthal, the liason officer for the Bikini
Trust.
Mangrove plantations are one of the methods used in the attempt to
protect the land from the ocean.
Their extensive root systems help build
up sand and act as a buffer against storm surges.
Photograph: Rémi
Chauvin for the Guardian
Marshallese foreign minister Tony de Brum, who has emerged as a champion of the global climate movement, says:“Displacement
is not an option we relish or cherish and we will not operate on that
basis. We will operate on the basis that we can in fact help to prevent
this from happening.”
But politics and atmospheric physics are running away from the
Marshallese.
In March 2014 almost 100 homes on the capital atoll Majuro
were destroyed by a combination of high tide and big swell.
More than
900 people were placed in shelters.
Families have since returned to live
in homes half collapsed into the sea.
“I can tell you right now that all of those [inundation] events that
have occurred in the Marshall Islands can be attributed to sea level
rise,” says Reginald White, the director of the Marshall Islands
National Weather Service.
On the pancake flat atolls, three centimetres
of sea level rise will cause a flood to spread inland a further 30
metres.
Reginald White, director of the Marshall Islands National Weather
Service on the effects of sea level rise, with a timelapse of rising
tides on Kiribati.
Videos: Guardian/Rémi Chauvin
The higher sea level combines with seasonal high tides (known as king
tides), large swells and high winds to push water on to the land.
During
La Niña years (part of the couple of ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that
affects weather globally and includes El Niño) the seas can rise up to
30cm above normal.
The last decade of predominantly La Niña conditions
has offered a bleak curtain raiser for things to come.
“We are seeing more extreme events today than we used to see in the
60s, 70s and 80s. Even without La Niña we still receive inundations,”
says White. Some scientists predict
climate change will cause more intense and more frequent El Niño and La
Niña events – although this is less certain than sea level rise.
El
Niño events are typically followed by dry periods in the Marshall
Islands.
During 2013, after a very weak El Niño, the northern atolls
were hit by a severe drought.
Food and water were delivered to desperate communities.
Production of coconut oil, one of the countries only exports, fell by
almost a third, a loss of close to US$2.5m (£1.6m) or 1.5% of GDP.
“If there is another drought then the industry will be gone. That
will really effect everything here,” says Mison Levai, the marketing
manager of the national coconut oil producer Tobolar.
This will not only
be bad news for the 70 employees of Tobolar’s refinery in Majuro.
For
the 20,000 people who live on the rural coconut-growing ‘outer atolls’
the equation is simple.
No coconuts, no income.
On the outer atoll of Arno, families work together every day, six
days a week, collecting fallen drupes, removing the husks, skilfully
shucking the flesh (called copra) and drying it in makeshift ovens.
It
is then shipped to Majuro to be turned into oil and exported.
Torrak Anton, a copra farmer, uses a stick to scratch the arithmetic
of his poverty in the dirt of the road.
After food, rent and
contributions to the copra dealer and island chief, he is left with $34 a
week for the seven people in his household.
During times of drought the
coconuts shrink and the money for clothing, housing and education
disappears.
Without copra, outer islanders will be reduced to a subsistence
survival, eked from the land, supplemented by fishing and likely made
impossible by tidal inundations.
Already 1,200-1,400 people are reported
to have moved from rural atolls to district centres – exacerbating
overcrowding and making flooding in the capital Majuro more damaging.
Depending on how sharply the world cuts carbon emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts the global mean sea level will rise by 26-82cm between now and 2100.
The IPCC concluded in 2013 that even if the increasingly
quixotic-looking “safe” limit of 2C of global warming were somehow
achieved by the Paris talks, the sea would continue to wash over Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
What the rest of the world considers acceptable climate change is, quite simply, a disaster for atoll dwellers.
In spite of De Brum’s refusal to countenance a national evacuation,
White says the Marshall Islands are likely to become unliveable for all
but a hardy few before the midway point of this century.
“What is the exact definition of habitable? It gets to a point where
the extreme events become so frequent that it becomes very uncomfortable
to make a good living,” he says.
The people of Kiribati (pronounced Ki-ri-bas) are the Marshall
Islands’ fellows on the low road to climate oblivion.
The capital atoll Tarawa is overcrowded and underdeveloped, even compared to Majuro.
Rita
Kaimwata, a 27-year-old mother of two (soon to be three), lives in a
typical Kiribati
home of driftwood, salvaged timber and palm thatching.
Her tiny block
of land in the village of Temwaiku is separated from the Pacific Ocean
by a thin dirt road and a hump of sand less than a metre high.
Like many Tarawans, the Kaimwata’s access to food and fresh water is
tenuous.
Their diet of rice and fish is supplemented by whatever
vegetables they can grow.
Every second day, for one hour, the government
pumps treated drinking water and the family fill up a small tank.
This
precious water must be kept for keeping hydrated in the punishing
equatorial heat.
For bathing, dishes, clothes and watering vegetables there is a well
that taps the thin layer of fresh water (called a lens) a couple of
metres below the ground.
But last year (and again a few months ago) the
sea swept over the road, through the Kaimwata’s home, across their
cabbages and into the well.
Now nothing grows.
Kiribati islander Tokeman Tekaakau’s house is threatened by the rising tides.
Set against scientific warnings of a future of catastrophic climate change events (such as typhoon Haiyan and hurricane Sandy)
the loss of a vegetable patch seems insignificant.
But for Kaimwata’s
children the link between food, water and rising sea levels is profound
and the margin between life and death could be as fine as the ability to
grow a few cabbages.
Kaimwata, like many residents (called i-Kiribati), giggles to hide
distress.
“I laugh because sometimes we believe that in 20 or 30 years
our country will be gone forever. But it’s not funny.”
Devoid of rock
and substantial natural defences, this is among the most marginal of all
regular human habitats.
Nearly a decade of regular inundations has caused parts of Tarawa’s
already thin and polluted water lens to turn salty. Clean water is
almost non-existent.
Crops have died.
Between 2005 and 2010, the number
of malnourished multiplied eight times.
In September, an outbreak of rotavirus from bad water infected 2,513 children under five years old. Seven were killed.
Kaimwata looks around at her children and her neighbours’ children:
“Only the children get sick. Many children die in Kiribati when they get
the diarrhoea.”
More than a third of i-Kiribati are under 15.
The water situation is desperate.
Water is being drawn from the
freshwater lens 20% faster than rain replaces it.
Bacteria from open
defecation (there are few toilets), industrial and domestic chemicals
and seawater contaminate all water sources – including the government
supply.
Only 60% of the atoll’s population receive rations of ‘clean’
government water.
The other 23,000 rely solely on well water that
Tarawa’s director of public health Patrick Timeon describes as “grossly
unsafe”.
“The enormity of water-associated disease and death has not been
fully assessed,” says Timeon, but the direct and indirect impacts are
“colossal”.
He begs for assistance to raise just £70,000 for two
desalination plants that could provide safe water to the entire
population.
Building a sea wall on Kiribati.
Kiribati’s president Anote Tong is frank.
Years of failed talks and
prevarication by industrialised countries have shaken his belief in the
UN process.
The land, homes and futures of his people (like the
Bikinians before them) have been deemed the price of doing business, the
acceptable cost of delaying the end of the carbon economy.
In contrast
to De Brum, he is already working on encouraging his people to leave.
“If what will happen in Paris will deal with the case of the most
vulnerable countries like us, then maybe we have some guarantee that we
will be able to stay. But if we don’t, I’m not going to put the future
of my country on the outcome and the whims and wishes of those countries
to decide. We’ve got to plan ahead. The old saying wish for the best
but plan for the worst,” he says.
The countries’ contrary rhetoric on climate change is partly informed
by their differing migration opportunities.
The Marshallese have a
compact of free association with the US, meaning they can resettle as
they wish.
But the i-Kiribati have few avenues of emigration.
Tong’s
despairing statements are partly designed to goad Kiribati’s major donor
countries Australia and New Zealand to open their borders to his
people.
His plan for the worst, encourages young people to learn a profession
and ‘migrate with dignity’.
“We have to relocate people because the
landmass is going to decline. That’s common sense. Simple common sense …
I can say that I refuse to move, but that’s being stupid isn’t it?
Because it will not be me that will be affected. It will be my
grandchildren,” he says.
Even now, it is not difficult to find the suffering grandchildren of
Kiribati.
Between Tong’s modest parliament and Kaimwata’s home is
Tarawa’s hospital.
The overloaded facility desperately needs
modernisation and expansion.
People sleep on the floor or outside on the
ground.
Cats roam the wards and ants swarm around dripping taps.
In a
corner of the paediatrics wing, panting slowly in the heat, lies
one-year-old Atanimatang Atanimatang.
He fell sick during the rotavirus outbreak in September and his
little body has wrestled against the diarrhoea and fever caused by the
virus for four months.
He shows signs of kwashiorkor,
a type of malnutrition commonly found in regions hit by famine.
His
mother Katewea Atanimatang watches her son’s febrile sleep.
They receive
government water, she says, but when it is not available they are
forced to drink from the well. She looks exhausted and sad.
When I contacted one of his nurses in the days before publication,
Atanimatang had recovered slightly.
He may yet live long enough to go to
school, attend church, marry and have children - like most other
i-Kiribati and Marshallese.
But if he does, it’s likely he’ll also live
to see his homeland evacuated.
The elders are distraught that this loss is being committed to their
young.
The Reverend Eria Maerierie is an old man.
He won’t live to see
his country’s loss.
But he has a long enough memory to know that things
have changed. If the tide is high on a Sunday he now conducts services
in a church surrounded by water.
And he rages against the apathy behind
the rising sea.
“We are suffering in this part of the world from what those people in
the rich world are working with gases. And its consequences fell on us
in the Pacific. They have been selfish, thinking of what they can
achieve with gas. What can we do? We just live with that dying feeling
in our hearts. Our voice is nothing to them.”
A young girl crosses the lagoon at high tide to get some water for her
family, who live on a thin strip of sand that gets cut off from the main
island every high tide.
Photograph: Rémi Chauvin for the Guardian
Will the atolls disappear?
The most widely-reported and possibly most misleading ‘effect of
climate change’ in atoll nations is erosion.
It’s a striking,
media-friendly narrative, climate change we can see.
Homes undermined by
rising seas, beaches scoured back to the coral shelf and coconut trees
felled by salt poisoning.
But the evidence showing a clear link between
the last century of sea level rise and erosion is far from conclusive.
Research on the erosion of atolls really only began in 2011. The University of Aukland’s Murray Ford has compared aerial photography
from the second world war with current satellite images and the results
may surprise some.
Despite a small but significant sea level rise of
20cm last century, Ford found that the last half of the century saw a
general (although not uniform) trend of accretion across 100 Pacific
atolls.
The islands are getting bigger.
“All the research that’s come out in the last few years has shown
that the islands aren’t eroding away. It’s kind of counter intuitive,”
says Ford.
“The conventional models show that they should be eroding,
but the current observations show that they aren’t.”
Rather than being the indisputable first effects of climate change,
all the photos of dead palms and disappearing beaches attest to the
extreme fragility of these landforms to change.
It is likely that on densely-populated Tarawa and Majuro, causeways,
shoreline developments and dredging have much more influence on local
erosion than sea level.
Confirmation bias also plays a part in both the
islanders’ perceptions and the reporting from these islands.
The eye
isn’t drawn so easily to the places where the sand is piling up.
Any
erosion is accepted as proof of the climate change narrative.
But just because the islands are growing now, doesn’t mean they won’t
suddenly begin eroding when the sea reaches a certain height.
At the
moment though, the disappearance of land is less of a threat than the
loss of habitable land, says Ford.
“The inundation risk continues to rise and it’s highly likely that
they’ll be frequently inundated well before they are eroded away,” he
says.
Days after it added stunning imagery of Mount Everest, Google Street View has been updated with beautiful photos from the other side of the world — the Brazilian islands of Fernando de Noronha and Atol das Rocas.
The new imagery includes both underwater and land photos of the UNESCO-protected islands, which tourists can only access in limited groups.
On Fernando de Noronha, a group of islands in the Atlantic some 220 miles offshore form the Brazilian coast, you'll find some of the most beautiful surf spots in the world, as well as some amazing beaches and interesting rock formations.
The Atol das Rocas is situated around 50 miles to the east of Fernando de Noronha.
It also offers some spectacular beaches, but the real thrills are located underneath the ocean's surface.
In the new Street View imagery, you can see dolphins swimming through the Canal de Sela Gineta (below) and sea turtles swimming at Buraco das Cabras.
As usual, besides taking the usual route of exploring through Google Maps' Street View feature, you can also check out the coolest sites from these locations in Google's highlights gallery.
Links :
Google LatLon : Mapping Brazilian islands, above ground and under the sea
The “monster” cyclone that hammered a tiny South Pacific archipelago over the weekend was caused by climate change, it was claimed today.
As aid began trickling into the devastated island community,
Vanuatu’s president Baldwin Lonsdale told gathered reporters that his
country – among the poorest in the world – would have to “start over” as
previous development had been “wiped out” by Cyclone Pam.
NASA's Terra satellite captured this visible image of Tropical Cyclone Pam showing her eye in the South Pacific Ocean on March 11 at 22:50 UTC.
Mr Lonsdale laid blame for the disaster, which has claimed at least six lives and injured more than 30, on “climate change.”
“We
see the level of sea rise … the cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain,
all this is affected … This year we have more than in any year …
yes, climate change is contributing to this,” he told reporters.
He was backed by the president of fellow South Pacific nation Kiribati,
Anote Tong, who claimed: “For leaders of low-lying island atolls, the
hazards of global warming affect our people in different ways, and it is
a catastrophe that impinges on our rights … and our survival into the
future. There will be a time when the waters will not recede.”
Global sea surface temperatures, showing an area of extremely warm water
near Vanuatu and Australia.
Image : NOAA/ESRL
Although the storm has passed over the islands, travelling in the
direction of New Zealand, officials are struggling to access the full
extent of the damage after winds of up to 168mph tore over the land,
home to 267,000 people, on Saturday.
"This is a very devastating
cyclone in Vanuatu. I term it as a monster, a monster," Mr Lonsdale said
from Sendai, Japan, where he had been attending a UN disaster
conference when the cyclone struck. He will return to his country today.
"It's
a setback for the government and for the people of Vanuatu. After all
the development that has taken place, all this development has been
wiped out."
Officials have been unable to contact outlying islands as
communications have fallen making a proper assessment of Vanuata’s 65
islands impossible.
"We do not know if our families are safe or
not. As the leader of the nation, my whole heart is for the people, the
nation," the president said, adding he had been unable to discover if
his own family was safe.
There have been reports of entire
villages disappearing.
An Australian Red Cross official claimed:
"Virtually every building that is not concrete has been flattened."
Today, the coordinator of Vanuatu’s National Disaster Management
Office Paolo Malatu said he plans to send what little light aircraft
possessed by the government to fly over the outer islands.
"The
damage to homes and infrastructure is severe," Mr Malatu said.
"The
priority at the moment is to get people water, food and shelter."
The
UK and France, previous rulers of the tiny nation until 1980, have
pledged aid.
Australia has promised A$5 million and also sent medical
experts, emergency supplies and a search and rescue team.
Links :
Mashable: Vanuatu's president makes a leap in tying Cyclone Pam to climate change
