Alexandria's Beaches Gone - Up To 1M Sea Level Rise Faces Nile Delta, World's #1 Wheat Importer

[hatrack]

(Reuters) - Twenty years ago, Taher Ibrahim raced his friends across Alexandria's beaches, now rising seas have swept over his favorite childhood playground. Alexandria, with 4 million people, is Egypt's second-largest city, an industrial center and a port that handles four-fifths of national trade. It is also one of the Middle East's cities most at risk from rising sea levels due to global warming.

"There were beaches I used to go to in my lifetime, now those beaches are gone. Is that not proof enough?" asked Ibrahim, a manager at a supermarket chain who is in his 40s.

Flooding could displace entire communities in Alexandria and the low-lying Nile Delta, the fertile agricultural heartland of Egypt's 79 million people. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Mediterranean will rise 30 cm to 1 meter this century.

More than half of Egypt's people live within 100 km of the coast. A 2007 World Bank study estimated that a one-meter sea level rise could displace 10 percent of the population. Officials say salt water could submerge or soak 10 to 12 percent of farmland in the world's largest wheat importer. "Climate change is happening at a pace that we had not anticipated," Suzan Kholeif of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries told Reuters. "Our records are clear and in my line of work, it is already a reality."

EDIT

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AD1DI20101114?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2Fenvironment+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Environment%29

[dipsydoodle]

1. Mediterranean tides are only a few centimetres

so if it affected Alexandria in that way it would equally affect the whole of the Med. It is also possible that Alexandria is actually sinking.