Revision summary
Sea level rises mainly because seawater expands as it warms and because land ice melts. Low atolls lose their freshwater lens and then their dry land to tides and storm surge. The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands live inside that risk. Legal identity, EEZ and citizenship become questions if territory disappears. Deltas such as the Sundarbans drown in a related way even though they are not island states.
Model answer
Introduction
Sea level does not rise as a metaphor. It rises because oceans warm and expand, and because ice on land slides into the sea. For a continent that is a few centimetres of a map, that is an inconvenience. For an atoll whose highest ridge is two or three metres, it is a question of whether the country still exists.
Body
The physical chain
Global mean sea level has risen by more than twenty centimetres since 1900, and the rate has accelerated. The IPCC links most of the recent rise to thermal expansion of seawater and to melt from Greenland, Antarctica and mountain glaciers. Storm surge then rides on a higher base. King tides flood streets that used to stay dry. Salt water pushes into thin freshwater lenses under coral islands, so wells turn brackish before the houses actually drown.
Nations that are also reefs
The Maldives, a chain of atolls in the Indian Ocean, has average island heights of one to two metres. Male’s sea walls are a daily argument with the tide. Tuvalu and Kiribati in the central Pacific have already bought land or discussed migration pathways because some islets are uninhabitable in spring tides. Marshall Islands faces the same arithmetic. These are not only environmental stories. They are legal stories. A State needs a defined territory. If the reef is under water, diplomats ask what happens to the exclusive economic zone and to citizenship.
Bangladesh’s Sundarbans and parts of the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta are not island nations, but they show the same drowning of villages, cyclone deaths and saline fields. Fiji has moved inland villages. Indonesia’s north Java coast is sinking under both sea rise and subsidence from groundwater pumping, which is a reminder that local geology can worsen a global trend.
Small islands also lose airports, tourism and fish when beaches erode. Culture is mapped onto a particular islet’s graveyard and church. Climate finance and the loss-and-damage debates at the UNFCCC exist because these states did little to cause the carbon, and they cannot raise their islands by a Himalayan centimetre.
Existence here means land, water that can be drunk, a runway, and a name on the map that still has soil under it.
Flow diagram
flowchart TB
subgraph ocean [Indian and Pacific oceans]
MV[Maldives]
TV[Tuvalu]
KI[Kiribati]
MH[Marshall Islands]
end
subgraph delta [South Asia]
SB[Sundarbans delta]
end
W[Warming] --> E[Thermal expansion]
W --> I[Ice melt]
E --> SL[Sea-level rise]
I --> SL
SL --> MV
SL --> TV
SL --> KI
SL --> SB
Conclusion
Warming raises the sea by expansion and melt. Atoll states such as the Maldives, Tuvalu and Kiribati lose fresh water and dry land first, then the ordinary meaning of a country. Deltas share the flood even when they are not sovereign reefs.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Next question in the 2025 paper (Q5). View answer →
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Can sea walls save every atoll?
They can buy time for a capital like Male. They cannot cheaply ring every outer island, and they do not refill a poisoned well.
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Is this only a future problem?
King tides, brackish wells and relocated Pacific villages are already present tense.
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