Sundarbans National Park faces two serious risks. Rising sea levels due to global warming could floor the park and threaten the tigers, wild birds, and other native species. And the River Ganges, which feeds the delta where the park is located, is so polluted from industrial outflow, raw sewage, human remains, and naturally occurring arsenic that the water is no longer safe for humans or animals to drink.
Sundarbans is used to dancing on the edge – on the edge between India and Bangladesh, on the edge between the saline Bay of Bengal and the three freshwater rivers that feed it, on the edge between monsoon floods and a dry season that is not all that dry.
And now, as if rising sea levels and upstream dams are not bad enough, tectonic shifts are actually tilting the Bangladesh half of this vast delta, further disrupting the balance between fresh and salt waters that bred this unique ecosystem in the first place.
