Disappearing world

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago the first uninhabited islands,in the Pacific atoll of Kiribati, vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, (as featured on Survivor) have been evacuated as a precaution, but their land still juts above the sea.

The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented. The island is so remote that researchers first learned of the submergence of it and it's uninhabited neighbor when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures. Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. And experts say "it is only a matter of some years" before it's swallowed up as well.

The Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were estimated to be the first populated ones to disappear, by around the year 2015, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless.

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.