How long is bangladesh coastline

Now that is no longer possible. For some, the saltwater offers an opportunity. Where rice might have once grown, shrimp farms are taking over — the saltwater providing the right environment to switch to aquaculture. But, the ways they are being resilient now need to be sustainable into the future.

How sustainable will aquaculture be? If enough people convert and there is too much saline intrusion that could create new problems and distort the economy in ways people cannot predict. The art of re-routing water using earth walls to create artificial islands for farming is perhaps best-known as a Dutch initiative.

People in Bangladesh have also taken to building polders, as they are known, to protect their farm land. However, tensions arise when some farmers want to protect their agricultural land, on which they are growing rice, from saltwater intrusion while neighbouring farmers might inundate their land with saltwater in order to start farming shrimp.

It benefits those that want to convert but not everyone is doing so. The seawater and levees allow more control which in some cases worsens the salinity problem. Chen says there may now be , people migrating each year due to saltwater flooding, but it is hard to estimate accurately because the changing wider economy is also affecting migration. A strong economy in India attracts workers, too, who often seek construction or agricultural work.

The country has an area of , square kilometers and extends kilometers north to south and kilometers east to west. Bangladesh is bordered on the west, north, and east by a 2,kilometer land frontier with India and, in the southeast, by a short land and water frontier kilometers with Burma. On the south is a highly irregular deltaic coastline of about kilometers, fissured by many rivers and streams flowing into the Bay of Bengal. The territorial waters of Bangladesh extend 12 nautical miles, and the exclusive economic zone of the country is nautical miles.

Roughly 80 percent of the landmass is made up of fertile alluvial lowland called the Bangladesh Plain. Although altitudes up to meters above sea level occur in the northern part of the plain, most elevations are less than 10 meters above sea level; elevations decrease in the coastal south, where the terrain is generally at sea level. The region has a number of offshore islands and one coral island, st martin's island , off the coast of Myanmar.

The central portion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts hosts an artificial lake, the kaptai lake. It covers an area of about sq km in the dry season and about 1, sq km in the monsoon. Merely the southern fringes of this highly elevated block form a narrow strip of hills and hillocks in Bangladesh territory.

Hydrography the Ganges-Padma, the Brahmaputra-Jamuna, and the Surma-Meghna and their numerous tributaries and distributaries are the arteries of the drainage system of Bangladesh. The karnafuli , the sangu , the matamuhuri , the Feni, and the naf along with their feeding channels drain the water of the high hill ranges of the districts of Chittagong and Chittagong Hill Tracts directly to the Bay of Bengal.

Many small streams that originate from the westernmost hill ranges also independently fall into the bay. The pride of Bangladesh is its river network, of which the Ganges-Padma, the Jamuna, the Brahmaputra, the Meghna, the surma , the Karnafuli, and the Tista are most important, and their tributaries and distributaries numbering around , with a total length of about 24, km, flow down to the Bay of Bengal.

The country possesses the world's longest unbroken beach, km in length from Cox's Bazar to Teknaf. The combined drainage basin of the three great rivers - Ganges-Padma, Brahmaputra-Jamuna and Meghna has a size of about 1.

These rivers carry an immense freight of sediments into the Bay of Bengal. The Brahmaputra-Jamuna, for instance, transports about 1. The silt freight carried each year by the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems into the Bay of Bengal amounts to almost 2.

Climate characterised by tropical monsoon climate. Bangladesh has three distinct seasons: the pre-monsoon hot season Summer from March through May, rainy monsoon season which lasts from June through October, and a cool dry winter season from November through February. However, March may also be considered as the spring season, and the period from mid-October through mid-November may be called the autumn. The pre-monsoon hot season is characterised by high temperature and occurrence of thunderstorms.

April is the hottest month in the country when mean temperature ranges from 27'C in the east and south to 31'C in the west-central part of the country. After April, increasing cloud-cover dampens temperature. Wind direction is variable in this season, especially during its early part. Rainfall accounts for 10 to 25 percent of the annual total, which is caused by thunderstorms.

Southerly or south-westerly winds, very high humidity, and heavy rainfall and long consecutive days of rainfall characterise the rainy season, which coincides with summer monsoon. Rainfall of this season accounts for 70 to 85 percent of the annual total.

This is caused by the tropical depression s that enter the country from the bay of bengal. Low temperature, cool air blowing from the west or northwest, clear sky, and meagre rainfall characterise the cool dry season. Ground frost is occasionally experienced on exposed hill sites, but not on the plains.

Significant differences in seasonal temperatures occur across the country. In general, the highest pre-monsoon temperatures occur in the west. During the monsoon, the average rainfall varies from about mm in the western districts of Rajshahi, bogra , kushtia and jessore to more than 2, mm in the southeastern and northeastern parts of the country, with a maximum exceeding 5, mm in the extreme northeast at the Foot Hills of the Shillong Massif.

The high rate of precipitation results in regularly occurring floods. The Chittagong coastal region to the southeast has a narrow attachment to the bulk of the country. Small hill regions in the northeast and southeast are the only variations of the land's flat alluvial plains flatlands containing deposits of clay, silt, sand, or gravel deposited by running water, such as a stream or river. Since 90 percent of Bangladesh is only about 10 meters 33 feet above sea level, there is concern that permanent flooding will occur if the Indian Ocean rises as predicted due to global warming.

Sri Lanka and India border the bay on the west, Bangladesh forms its north shore, and Myanmar and Thailand surround it on the east. The bay covers an area that is about 2, kilometers 1, miles long and 1, kilometers 1, miles wide. The ocean often threatens catastrophe for Bangladesh in the form of cyclones and tidal bores. Several flat islands lie just offshore in the Bay of Bengal; many are inhabited by fishing communities. In the Padma-Meghna estuary triangle there are a number of permanent islands, including many that surface only at low tide.

There are also temporary "chars," land forms built up by silting that may either become permanent or erode. Rivers and streams fragment Bangladesh's coastline in the delta region an area, usually triangular in shape, where rivers deposit soil. The section of the Kulna delta that covers the coastline area from the western border to the Padma-Meghna estuary is called the Sundarbans. This is a forested, tidal-flushed, salt marsh region; so much of it is shifting, low, and swampy that humans cannot live there.

Atidal bore is a unique wave that sweeps up a shallow river or estuary place where a river joins a larger body of water on the incoming tide but against the river's current.

Conditions are right for tidal bores to occur only in a few places in the world—and one of these is Bangladesh. The largest lake, Kaptai Lake, is artificial. Kaptai Lake is also known as the Karnaphuli Reservoir. It covers an area of square miles square kilometers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Much smaller lakes, called "mils" or "haors," are formed within the network of rivers that wind across Bangladesh's plains.

The large number of these lakes in the Meghna and Surma river plains causes frequent flooding in this area.