India’s navy will open a third air base in the far-off Andaman and Nicobar islands on Thursday to beef up surveillance of Chinese ships and submarines entering the Indian Ocean through the nearby Malacca Straits, military officials and experts said.
China’s creation of military-relevant facilities on its newly-created islands in the South China Sea is a cause for concern for countries in Southeast Asia, and several of its investments in the Indian Ocean are raising more questions over the possibility of China’s first dedicated naval support facility overseas.
Despite reports that China is planning a fourth fleet for the Indian Ocean, India doesn't appear to be losing any sleep over it.
Unconfirmed reports from Chinese-language articles and Western defense industry reports suggest China would build a fleet command headquarters at Sanya on Hainan Island.
Yet the main obstacles to such a strategy include diplomacy, logistics, and reliability, despite conducting successful, but limited, anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia, experts say.
The reports of the fourth fleet are "overstated speculation" and lack "credibility," said Ching Chang, a research fellow at Taiwan's ROC Society for Strategic Studies and a former Taiwan naval officer.
"Without any diplomatically credible, militarily reliable, and logistically functional forward base in the Indian Ocean area, it is impossible for the [Chinese Navy] to establish any long-lasting military organization there, though certain ad hoc arrangements such as dispatch forces, task forces and exercise maneuvering units may appear in the Indian Ocean from time to time," he said.
The Chinese Navy has three fleet commands: the North Sea Fleet in the Yellow Sea, East Sea Fleet in the East China Sea, and the South Sea Fleet in the South China Sea.
Hainan Island, the would-be headquarters for the fourth fleet, is only 200 nautical direct miles from the South Sea Fleet's base at Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province.
A Chinese military website, ostensibly sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army, quoting Sri Lanka media has reported that a Chinese Type 039 diesel-electric Song-class submarine along with Changxing Dao, a submarine support ship from the North Sea Fleet was sighted berthed alongside at the Colombo International Container Terminal. Although the pictures of the submarine and the support vessel together in the port have not been published either by the Sri Lankan or the Chinese media, it is believed that the submarine arrived in early September just before the Chinese President Xi Jingping’s visit to Sri Lanka. The report also states that the submarine was on a routine deployment and had stopped over for replenishment. Further, a Chinese naval flotilla would call at a Sri Lankan port later in October and November.
In the past, reports about the presence of Chinese submarines in the Indian Ocean have been announced in the media. For instance, the Indian media reported that a type-093 attack nuclear submarine was on deployment (December 2013 to February 2014) in the Indian Ocean and that the Chinese Ministry of National Defense (Foreign Affairs Office) had informed the Indian military attaché in Beijing of the submarine deployment to show ‘respect for India’. Apparently, the information of the deployment was also shared with the United States, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan and Russia.
The Indian monsoon is a complex system which is likely to change under future global warming. While it is in the very nature of weather to vary, the question is how much and whether we can deal with it. Extreme rainfall, for example, bears the risk of flooding, and crop failure. Computer simulations with a comprehensive set of 20 state-of-the-art climate models now consistently show that Indian monsoon daily variability might increase, according to a study just published by scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"Increased variability – this rather technical term translates into potentially severe impacts on people who cannot afford additional loss," says Anders Levermann, one of the study's authors and co-chair of PIK's research domain Sustainable Solutions. "The fact that all these different models agree is a clear message that adaptation measures can be built on." Even if seasonal mean precipitation would remain unchanged, impacts could be substantial, Levermann points out. "Focusing on the average is not always useful. If rainfall comes in a spell and is followed by a drought, this can be devastating even if the average is normal. This requires the right kind of adaptation measures that account for this variability – such as intelligent insurance schemes, for example."
"Limiting global warming is key, adaptation cannot replace but rather complement it"
The strongest change of 13 to 50 percent is found in a scenario in which greenhouse gases continue to be emitted unabated. However, even if global warming would be limited to the internationally acknowledged threshold of 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, this would bear the risk of additional day-to-day variability between 8 and 24 percent above the pre-industrial level, according to the analysis. "So limiting global warming is key to reduce day-to-day monsoon variability, adaptation cannot replace but rather complement it," says Levermann.
The researchers focused on the ten models with the most realistic monsoon pattern – a conservative approach, as these ten models yield generally lower rates of change. The other ten models showed higher rates of change. "This is not about exact percentages. It is the clear trend that conveys the message," says Arathy Menon, lead-author of the study. The scientists used the latest ensemble of climate models, prepared for the 5th assessement report of the International Panel on Climate Change. All of them show increased variability.
"This is a robust indicator"
Taking into account all 20 models, the spread of results reduces when the scientists looked at the rainfall changes per degree of global warming independent of the exact time path of the warming. The consistent result is that 4 to 12 percent variability change of daily monsoon rainfall in India are to be expected per degree Celsius of warming. "This is a robust indicator," says Menon.
A Precambrian microcontinent in the Indian Ocean
Authors:
1. Trond H. Torsvik (a,b,c,d,e,j)
2. Hans Amundsen (f)
3. Ebbe H. Hartz (a,g)
4. Fernando Corfu (d)
5. Nick Kusznir (h)
6. Carmen Gaina (a,b,d,j)
7. Pavel V. Doubrovine (a,b,j)
8. Bernhard Steinberger (a,b,i)
9. Lewis D. Ashwal (e)
10. Bjørn Jamtveit (a)
Affiliations:
a. Physics of Geological Processes, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway
b. Center of Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 0271 Oslo, Norway
c. Geodynamics, NGU, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway
d. Geosciences, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway
e. School of Geosciences, University of Witwatersrand, WITS 2050, South Africa
f. EPX, Jacob Aalls Gate 44b, N-0364 Oslo, Norway
g. Det norske oljeselskap, Postboks 2070 Vika, 0125 Oslo, Norway
h. Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK
i. Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Heinrich-Mann-Allee 18/19, 14473 Potsdam, Germany
j. Present address: Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway
Abstract:
The Laccadive–Chagos Ridge and Southern Mascarene Plateau in the north-central and western Indian Ocean, respectively, are thought to be volcanic chains formed above the Réunion mantle plume1 over the past 65.5 million years2, 3. Here we use U–Pb dating to analyse the ages of zircon xenocrysts found within young lavas on the island of Mauritius, part of the Southern Mascarene Plateau. We find that the zircons are either Palaeoproterozoic (more than 1,971 million years old) or Neoproterozoic (between 660 and 840 million years old). We propose that the zircons were assimilated from ancient fragments of continental lithosphere beneath Mauritius, and were brought to the surface by plume-related lavas. We use gravity data inversion to map crustal thickness and find that Mauritius forms part of a contiguous block of anomalously thick crust that extends in an arc northwards to the Seychelles. Using plate tectonic reconstructions, we show that Mauritius and the adjacent Mascarene Plateau may overlie a Precambrian microcontinent that we call Mauritia. On the basis of reinterpretation of marine geophysical data4, we propose that Mauritia was separated from Madagascar and fragmented into a ribbon-like configuration by a series of mid-ocean ridge jumps during the opening of the Mascarene ocean basin between 83.5 and 61 million years ago. We suggest that the plume-related magmatic deposits have since covered Mauritia and potentially other continental fragments.
