Sinking islands: Why it happens
* Inhabitants of small Pacific island-nations must be told of the truth why they are sinking, instead of being used as pawns in an unpopular agenda, writes ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ*

THE intensifying war between the advocates of global warming and those who dismiss it as a hoax is just making the people of small Pacific island-nations obvious pawns being manipulated by one side to further its agenda.
The agenda: Convince all nations – both industrialised and developing – to join the club now notoriously known as Kyoto Protocol and work together to reduce gas and carbon dioxide emissions resulting from their economic activities.
And the manipulation: To scare off inhabitants of low-lying island-nations in the Pacific that global warming is real and that it is now causing sea levels to rise and sinking their homelands.
The strategy: To tell the whole world that the small Pacific island-nations are sinking caused by rising sea level and that it is triggered by global warming, and to bring to the attention of developing and industrialised countries that they are causing greenhouse gas effects through excessive CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
Right now, the sinking feeling is being experienced by people in the island-nations of Tuvalu and Kiribati and Carteret Atolls, and most recently, the Duke of York islands, both in the northern side of Papua New Guinea. And they didn’t even know why until global warming advocates told them what was going on – that the sea level is rising and it is sinking them. And the culprit: Global warming that is allegedly melting the Antarctic ice.
Most of the Kyoto Protocol signatories who later ratified this international commitment have been told that uncontrolled industrial discharge of toxic pollutants into the atmosphere that amount to 97 billion tonnes annually results in greenhouse effect that is causing the planet’s atmospheric temperature to rise. This anomaly, as they have been told, is melting down portions of the Polar region.
The end result is that fresh waters cascading down from mountains of glaciers cause sea levels to rise and sink low-lying small islands and atolls, most of them in the Pacific. Furthermore, global warming is also heating up oceans bodies, causing them to expand and encroach into low-lying areas along coastal regions in the Pacific.
However, until recently, it has been noticed that global warming advocates were only publicizing worldwide the fate of Tuvalu while forgetting all about another sinking island groupings – the Carteret Atoll of Bougainville and lately, the Duke of York Islands in East New Britain whose sinking was first suspected by islanders after the massive eruptions of the two Rabaul volcanoes in 1994. Duke of York Island atoll is about 50 kilometers east of volcanic Rabaul while the Carteret Atoll is 400 kilometers away, also east of Rabaul.
Tuvalu, a grouping of four small islands and five atolls, has been used as a showcase of what is going to happen to low lying countries around the world as the ice caps melt.
“Tuvalu,” according to author and global structural engineer Richard W Guy, “is being used as pawns to keep our minds on rising sea levels supposedly caused by global warming.”
In short, Tuvalu is a prima facie case in the global warming debate, says Guy who wrote two top-selling books “The Mysterious Receding Seas” and “Is The Planet Expanding?”
In response to questions I emailed to Guy, he said: Is the evidence conclusive that Tuvalu is sinking because the sea level has allegedly risen? How conclusive it is, we will see in the next many years.”
The Carterets, with a maximum elevation of five feet, have much in common with Tuvalu and that is both are believed to be sitting on an active earthquake zone, says Guy who built docks, airports, highways and ports on land abandoned by receding seas in many parts of the world.
“However, the international media has chosen to ignore their dilemma (Carterets’) to keep it ëout of sight’ in order to add support to the rising sea level arguments of the global warming lobby. In other words, it is the inconvenient truth.”
Guy said that the Pacific island nations are sitting above a wide area of active earthquake zone, including that one around the two Rabaul cones — Mt Tavurvur and Vulcan — and over the past many decades, a wide area under the Pacific seafloors continued to be rocked by frequent earthquakes.
Guy said that such subterranean earthquakes are causing a shift on earth’s tectonic plates, with some areas being forced violently to rise above the water while others are being pulled down.
On early Sunday morning of September 18, 1994, two large earthquakes rocked around Rabaul, increasing in intensity later in the day. By late evening, parts of the shoreline began to rise noticeably after which volcanoes erupted.
In earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that happened in 1937, coral reefs in Rabaul waters surfaced and people feasted on trapped fish and other marine life. In May 29, 1939, a huge earthquake hit the Rabaul area and when eruption began spewing large volume of CO2 and killing animals in the vicinity for several months, ground uplift continued to expose new land on Matupit Island.
In the case of Tuvalu, Carterets, Duke of York Islands and Kiribati, the opposite is taking place: they are sinking because they are probably sitting on a widening slump that has been created over time by thousands of earthquakes closely observed by the Rabaul Volcanic Observatory and other monitoring agencies across the globe — the same tectonic activities that also caused some reef areas in Rabaul to rise above the water.
The last two major eruptions in Rabaul that took place about 1,400 years ago alongside strong temblors created a circular depression (sunken geological formation) called caldera that created the Simpson Harbour, now one of the best harbours in the South Pacific owing to its depth.
According to The Misunderstood Universe, a website that discusses global warming based on recent scientific data, while sea levels have risen more than 390 feet since the last ice age, the oceans have been fairly constant for the past 6,000 years.
TMU noted that since the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which contain over 95% of the world’s ice, lie well above the permafrost zone, even with present day global warming factors, they cannot melt in less than several thousand years; making it highly unlikely that they will contribute in any meaningful way to the rise of sea levels in the next couple hundred years.
TMU further said that even if all of these ice formations melted overnight, the projected rise in sea level would be less than 2 feet.
Debunking claims about rising sea levels, especially in the Pacific, Guy said in his email to this writer:
“The sea level is not rising but in fact, the opposite is taking place. Receding seas occur all around the world. Earthquakes are telling us that expansion of the planet earth is taking place. The earthquake is the release of tension in the earth’s surface.
“As this tension is released a fissure is left. That fissure is the outward evidence that expansion has taken place. These fissures appear after most quakes depending on intensity of the release.
“The fissures created a void or slump as the earth surface stretches during expansion caused by the planet’s internal combustion. New Orleans and the Louisiana coast are sinking as the Mississippi River fault line expands due to this tectonic activity.
“The Pacific Islands are sinking as the Pacific sea floor stretches due to the same tectonic activity Ö on the other side of the equation the seas are receding because of this global expansion.”
Guy said the 2004 tsunami in South East Asia was caused by a major earthquake off the Island of Sumatra. It created a slump in the ocean floor that triggered the tidal wave.
He said there was a small point but an important point that most everyone missed.
It was reported that after the tsunami events, the sea level fell offshore. The sea on the shoreline did not return to its former shoreline level; it receded.
“Today, the sea is still receding and the trend will not change,” Guy said.
“It is going to take 30 years for small island nations to realize that they have been duped by international media and the international lending agencies. The two factions work in accord. One is keeping the hype of rising seas alive, while the other is making loan funds available to them to build coastal defences as protection from rising seas.
“In 30 years, it will be discovered that rising sea levels was a non-event. By that time, however, many small nations have already spent substantial portion of their already stretched budgets on useless pursuits.
Guy said it is grossly unfair and irrational that they should incur more long term-debts in order to offset the myth of rising sea levels. Their children and grandchildren will have to pay for their folly.
All they have to do is move on to a higher ground instead of fighting the encroaching sea because the tectonic activity on the ocean floor which they can never prevent is the one causing their sinking and not global warming.
Guy said: “All the tiny islands perched on top of seamounts in the Pacific have my sympathy, for I too, am an Islander. If it is any consolation, all our islands are just tops of ancient volcanoes and we all are born of geological violence.
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