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The balmy islands of Seychelles couldn't feel farther from Antarctica, but their fossil corals could reveal much about the fate of polar ice sheets.

The balmy islands of Seychelles couldn't feel farther from Antarctica, but their fossil corals could reveal much about the fate of polar ice sheets.

Mozambique city battled climate change, then came a cyclone.

The Unfolding Tragedy of Climate Change in Bangladesh.

Cave dig shows the earliest Australians enjoyed a coastal lifestyle.

Sea levels around the world have risen by 1.7 millimeters (0.07 inches) on average each year since 1880, but in recent years, scientists have observed a rapid increase in sea level in the north Indian Ocean. Tide gauge records and other datasets reveal the pace of sea level rise in the north Indian Ocean has accelerated to 3.1 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year within the last three decades.

The Sundarbans crab farmers battling climate crisis - and pirates.

In coming decades as coastal communities around the world are expected to encounter sea-level rise, the general expectation has been that people's migration toward the coast will slow or reverse in many places.

In the Maldives, an MIT team is conducting experiments to combat sea-level rise by redirecting natural sand movement.

In recent years, shoreline determination has become an issue of increasing importance and concern, especially at the local level, as sea level continues to rise. This study identifies the rates of absolute and net erosion, accretion, and shoreline stabilization along the coast of Kuakata, a vulnerable coastal region in south-central Bangladesh. Shoreline change was detected by applying remote sensing and geographic information system (RS-GIS)-based techniques by using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) satellite images at 30-m resolution from 1989, 2003, 2010, and 2020. The band combination (BC) method was used to extract the shoreline (i.e., land-water boundary) due to its improved accuracy over other methods for matching with the existing shoreline position. This study also used participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tools which revealed the societal impacts caused by the shoreline changes. Coupling RS-GIS and PRA techniques provides an enhanced understanding of shoreline change and its impacts because PRA enriches the RS-GIS outcomes by contextualizing the findings. Results show that from 1989 to 2020, a total of 13.59 km2 of coastal land was eroded, and 3.27 km2 of land was accreted, suggesting that land is retreating at about 0.32 km2 yr-1. Results from the PRA tools support this finding and demonstrate that fisheries and tourism are affected by the shoreline change. These results are important in Kuakata, a major tourist spot in Bangladesh, because of the impacts on fisheries, recreation, resource extraction, land use planning, and coastal risk management.

Rising sea levels, coupled with the natural variability of atoll islands and coral reefs, is creating new uncertainty in international law, with geopolitical implications.

Mangrove forests around the Indo-Pacific region could be submerged by 2070, according to international research published today.

Mangrove forests around the Indo-Pacific region could be submerged by 2070, according to international research published today.

For Pacific islands like Palau, Tuvalu and Kiribati, the implications of climate change are clear - and devastating. Already, these governments have begun to plan for a future in which entire populations have to relocate as their islands vanish under the rising sea. But climate change also threatens ways of life in subtler ways, leaving families around the world to work out for themselves how to cope.

The continued accumulation of sand within the iconic ring-shaped reefs inside Maldivian atolls could provide a foundation for future island development new research suggests. Islands like the Maldives are considered likely to be the first to feel the effects of climate change induced sea level rise, with future island growth essential to counter the threat of rising sea levels.

In the Maldives, one of the world's lowest-lying countries, new and urgent solutions are needed to protect the islands from the impacts of climate change. Tourist resort owners and local communities are joining government authorities in efforts to make the islands more resilient.

Sea-level rise and wave-driven flooding will negatively impact freshwater resources on many low-lying atoll islands in such a way that many could be uninhabitable in just a few decades.

Why seagrass is so important to our environment.

Climate change: Model predicts Australia to lose famous sites in new sea-level rise.

There is growing awareness of the need for greater acknowledgement of underwater prehistoric cultural resources as part of management and regulation of the seabed around many maritime countries, especially those with large indigenous populations and history such as Australia. Prehistoric cultural places and landscapes inundated by Post-glacial sea-level rise on Australia's continental shelf remain largely out-of-sight and out-of-mind, hence awareness and hence legal protection of this resource is lacking. There is a clear need for greater integration of archaeology and cultural heritage management within the marine sciences as well as a greater awareness of this resource as part of a common heritage more generally. This paper explores some of the dichotomies between Western and Indigenous cultures in valuing and managing the seabed. We argue that in developing science-policy, an attempt at least needs to be made to bridge both the gap between the nature and culture perspectives, and the jurisdictional divide between land and sea. Part of the answer lies in a convergence of Indigenous knowledge with Western science approaches, focused around our understanding of physical processes impacting past and present coastal landscapes and on the seabed itself. We explore several case studies from northern and Western Australia that are trying to do this, and which are helping to provide a greater appreciation of the inundated landscapes of the inner shelf as part of a common heritage.