AWASH IN A RISING SEA - How global warming is overwhelming the islands of the tropical Pacific - Cover Story

OUR ALUMINUM SKIFF plow [i]or[/i] part of to the other Tarawa Lagoon's emerald waters, throwing up a spray that glitters in the sunlight like a cascade of diamonds. North and west is the barely visible village of Naa, and beyond that lies what I've advance to see or, more accurately, not see: Tebua Island.

According to local myth Tebua has existed since creation. on the contrary now, I've been told, it is gone swallowed by means of the sea. Its fate, a certain quantity of say, was triggered by global warming--the unnatural increase in the Earth's temperature caused through air pollutants that trap solar heat.

Tebua's disappearance is not the alone sign that global warming is making itself felt in the distant reaches of the Pacific, where scientists have drawn out predicted that rising waters would absorb low- lying islands. Other islands have disappeared, too. Cemeteries are crumbling into the ocean. Salt has poisoned water supplies. Malaria and other diseases have spread. And large ocean white horses have engulfed once- safe dwellings with no warning.

facts like these provide a powerful confirmation that global warming is not just a distant threat on the contrary is underway, with dire implications for the race of the Pacific. "The hard verity is that it is probably too late to save mid-Pacific islands like Tarawa," says climate authority Irving Mintzer of the Pacific Institute for Studies in exhibition Environment and Security. "Absent a miracle or something comparable, many will almost certainly disappear within our lifetimes."

For me the real test will be spelled through the answer to a simple question: Has Tebua really disappeared beneath the waves as reported? To diocese for myself, I've traveled 12000 miles above three hard days for International Wildlife.

Tebua lies not upon Tarawa Atoll on the farthest western edge of the nation of Kiribati (KEER-ri-bas), a collection of islands stretching across the Pacific in an area nearly the width of the United States. Kiribati is in the way that low--three feet or less above sea horizontal in most places--that from a distance, islands disappear into an azure vault of heavens It is "the place where heaven befittings ocean," according to its family the I- Kiribati.

Despite its immense size, Kiribati has no railroads, military, newspapers or manufacturing facilities. It overlays roughly 2.5 million square miles of ocean--into which Alaska could be dropp with play left over for another 20 to 30 U states. on the contrary the land area itself is a nothing else but fly speck--just 275 square miles. Economically, Kiribati is smooth tinier. Its total gross national harvest (mostly from export of copra, or coconut meat, used to make soaps and oils) is roughly equal to that of about 2900 Americans.

To understand Tarawa's geography, picture the make open jaws of a crocodile. The bottom jaw is southerly Tarawa. At its tip lies Betio (BAY-see-oh), site of the gory battle for "one square mile of hell," where more than 1700 U Marines and sailors were killed pioneering the amphibious landing techniques that made island-hopping victory in the Pacific possible during World War II. The top jaw is North Tarawa. At its tip, where the crocodile's snout would be and just not on shore from the northernmost village of Naa, lies Tebua.

Before I head on the outside for Tebua, I stop to diocese Nakibae Teuatabo, the country's foremost specialist upon global warming. To introduce me to his atoll, he plants out with me in my fractureed Toyota to navigate Tarawa's single road, a narrow asphalt strip with a faded centerline and ragged, crumbling cutting sides We pass Scout Island, for a like reason named for the generations of I-Kiribati stripling Scouts that have camped there. It has shrivelled by around one-third. The coconut palm tree upon its fringes have died and those remaining in the center are circled through encroaching salt bushes that can tolerate shallow, saline waters. They enlarge everywhere. Unlike the palms, however, they provide neither shade nor provisions "This is my model for what will happen to Kiribati," Teuatabo says.

Like the salt bush, evidence of global warming is everywhere upon Tarawa. It starts with energy-sapping heat. Since 1920 in the southwest Pacific, atmospheric temperatures have risen about 1 step C (an increase of 1 step Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), although the world as a whole has warmed less--about 06 steps C over the past hundred according to the Intergovernmental Panel upon Climate Change.

In all, if you include Australia and novel Zealand, there are 14 island nations and more than a dozen and a half other dependencies that tighten for more than 7,000 miles across the Pacific (see map, page 30) Among them, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Samoa, Vanuatu and fresh Caledonia have warming rates higher than 1 stage C per century.

completely through the region, the weather has changed dramatically. According to Jim Salinger, senior climate specialist at fresh Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, there have been shifts in rainfall completely through the Pacific. It's wetter in French Polynesia and to the east and north; drier to the west and southerly with more frequent droughts, in Kiribati, Fiji and of recent origin Caledonia.