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Rising sea levels threaten to flood many of the islands in the broad and fertile Ganges delta, leading to environmental disaster and a refugee crisis for India and Bangladesh

Dependra Das stretches out his arms to show his flaky skin, covered in raw saltwater sores. His fingers submerged in soft black clay for up to six hours a day, he spends his time frantically shoring up a crude sea dike surrounding his remote island home in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest delta.

Alongside him, across the beach in long lines, the villagers of Ghoramara island, the women dressed in purple, orange and green saris, do the same, trying to hold back the tide.

For the islanders, each day begins and ends the same way. As dusk descends, the people file back to their thatched huts. By morning the dike will be breached and work will begin again. Here in the vast, low-lying Sundarbans, the largest mangrove wilderness on the planet, Das, aged 70, is preparing to lose his third home to the sea in as many years. Here, global warming is a reality, not a prediction.

Over the course of a three-day boat trip through the Sundarbans, The Observer found Das’s plight to be far from unique. Across the delta, homes have been swept away, fields ravaged by worsening monsoons, livelihoods destroyed. Events confirm what experts have been warning: that the effects of global warming will be most severe on those who did the least to contribute to it and can least afford measures to adapt or save themselves. For these islanders, building clay walls is their only option.

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A chunk of Antarctic ice about seven times the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said Tuesday.

Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica, which started February 28.

It was the edge of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years.

This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan.

Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video.

“It’s an event we don’t get to see very often,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“The cracks fill with water and slice off and topple. … That gets to be a runaway situation.”

Global Warming

While icebergs naturally break away from the mainland, collapses like this are unusual but are happening more frequently in recent decades, Vaughan said. (Related: National Geographic’s Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition.)

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A new United Nations study has found that glaciers across the globe are shrinking faster than ever before. The UN says the consequences could be grim for billions of people who depend on glacial melt and urges global leaders to act swiftly on climate change.

Glaciers across the globe are melting faster than at any point in the last century. Many could disappear within decades, and their decline could cause droughts and chaos for billions of people who depend on rivers fed by glaciers.

This was the sobering message delivered Sunday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), along with a plea to international leaders to act swiftly and drastically to address climate change, which the UNEP says is to blame for the glacial melt.

Glacial melt is the “canary in the climate change coal mine,” said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner in a statement. “It is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and take notice,” he said.

The announcement was based on a study that tracked glacial melt at nearly 30 glaciers across the globe. Some of the most dramatic losses were in Europe; Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier topped the list by shrinking 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) in 2006.

“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, a Zurich-based research institute that conducted the study.

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(red emphasis, above, was mine)