ECR, OMR submerged; Mylapore, Besant Nagar under water

Look around you. Your house may soon be swallowed by the sea.

The growing volumes of fresh water held behind dams in the world's artificial reservoirs have had an appreciable mitigating effect on rising sea levels, according to a surprising study published today

Policy planners on Monday said Bangladesh, among the least developed countries, would be the worst suffer of global environment degradation and rise in the sea level.

British scientists in Antarctica have found evidence of glaciers the size of Texas surging towards the ocean, BBC reported. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level. The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers in a remote and seldom visited part of west Antarctica. The "rivers of ice' have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean. David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: "It has been called the weak underbelly of the west Antarctic ice sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior. "If there is a feedback mechanism to make the ice sheet unstable, it will be most unstable in this region.' There is good reason to be concerned. Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade. The biggest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is causing the most concern. Julian Scott has just returned from there. He told BBC: "This is a very important glacier; it's putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. "It's a couple of kilometres thick, its 30 km wide and it's moving at 3.5km per year, so it's putting a lot of ice into the ocean.' It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice. At times, the temperature got down to minus 30

The Arctic reflects what ails a world gripped by global warming. As the ice melts and nations vie for rich mineral resources once hidden under the snow, the writing on the wall is often ignored, says Fatima Chowdhury Thousands of miles away in the Arctic region, fate stands delicately balanced at the edge of time. Located at the North Pole, the region includes the Arctic Ocean surrounded by the five Arctic states