Scientists have been warning that global warming will soon put portions of Bangladesh under water, but new research published in Dhaka says the country actually has grown larger since the 1970s.
Scientists at the Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services in the Bangladeshi capital say the country is gaining about 20 square kilometers of land mass a year. All of the new land comes from the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and 200 other rivers that flow through Bangladesh to the sea.
Each year their waters dump more than 600 million tons of sediment in southern Bangladesh, and the accumulated sediment eventually becomes solid land. The U.N. Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change has estimated that rising sea levels caused by global warming will swamp the homes of 20 million Bangladeshis by 2050.
The new study's authors, however, say
more new land is being created each year than the sea takes away.