I wish I could speak Tagalog. Floods "Tony Oposa delivered a whirlwind of a speech, brimming with passion and just enough fury on the future of floods. He said that we have to accept that Metro Manila will one day return to what it was – a delta. “The obscure will be figured out sooner or later. The obvious takes a lot longer.” Ondoy showed Metro Manilans what a one-meter sea-level rise would look like. “In the laws of nature, there is no right or wrong, there are no rewards or punishments. There are only consequences.”"
That looks like a good presentation. Flying over Luzon is a geography lesson - you can see at once that the whole land is a range of volcanoes that are still pushing up and which are constantly washed down into the sea. Geologically, the whole place is "new". Just very recently, the population has spread onto flood plains...
Yes. I don't know the geology of the Philippines but it is basically a volcanic arc on the ring of fire. Pretty young geologically. There appears to be reference to some older stuff e.g. Palawan, but I haven't yet found anything that is comprehensive . I wonder how well surveyed it is? I am still left wondering about the chocolate hills. LOL. I reckon they are iron age burial mounds. LOL
Apparently Palawan and the rest of the Philippine islands have different geological origins. Palawan is much older with some of its rocks being 250 to 300 million years old. The rest of the Philippines being significantly younger at a mere 150 million years old and younger, indeed effectively right up to the present. "Ancient geological history of the Philippine archipelago As Australia drifted northward and began to collide with Asia, tectonic pressure caused parts of the Pacific seafloor to uplift, producing volcanoes that gave rise to the Philippine islands. Sometime in the mid-Oligocene, about 30 mya, the Philippines was starting to take shape with the development of three major geological blocks. The first unit, which now comprise modern day Palawan and Mindoro and other smaller islands, rifted from the Asian continental shelf, south of the current location of Taiwan. At about the same time, hundreds of kilometers southeast of its present-day location, proto-Luzon, which began as a string of small volcanic islands developing beneath a shallow sea, was moving northwest. Further southeast of proto-Luzon, the islands of the Visayas and Mindanao were borne out of the continued subduction of the converging plates in the Pacific, and were also migrating northwest. Throughout the Cenozoic, these major geological units were approaching one another, but it was only in the Miocene that they began to emerge above sea level . About 10 mya Mindoro was uplifted and large land areas were already exposed for the two other geological units. Starting in the Pliocene, 5 mya , Palawan emerged, while other smaller islands and peninsulas such as Bicol, Camiguin and Sibuyan, and the Sulu islands only surfaced much later The 7000+ islands of the Philippines had never been connected to any other Asian landmass, except for Palawan, which became contiguous with Borneo when sea level dropped repeatedly during the Pleistocene, accounting for Palawan’s biotic similarity to the former." The Philippines have simply been generated as a result of a collision of geological continental plates, which is ongoing today.
This is the head of the Philippines delegation at the Doha climate change conference, a few days ago.. [video=youtube;OpI-PD6weG8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OpI-PD6weG8[/video]
Yes. Thanks for that Methersgate. I don't recall a lot in the UK media on this. Maybe I wasn't watching at the time. But signatories are only accounting for 15% of emissions. Not so good for the Philippines, especially.
