As you might expect, my first inclination was to respond to this article's title with a smart azz comment along the lines of "well, duh, yeah..the coast!" Then I read it and found it pretty interesting. I always considered the oceans to be uniform with regard to "sea level". Whatever changes happen, increase or decrease, I figured it would be the same globally. According to this, that is far from the truth.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/201007...smorethanothers

Whenever I see stuff like this I never take a story seriously:

Two wind patterns in the Indian Ocean, known as the Hadley circulation and the Walker circulation, interact with the Indo-Pacific warm pool to drive sea level changes. These wind patterns could become supercharged due to human-caused climate change.

So climate change is only human caused now? The writer has his own agenda and probably blames global warming all on humans. Any ocean area that is carved away from the main ocean like the Bay of Bengal can have a higher or lower water level than the main ocean depending on how winds drive water in or away from a such cutoff water area. Just look at what happens in a pool if you get a strong enough T-storm downdrat. Water will always slosh unevenly into areas with only one opening, which is why a place like the Bay of Bengal is one of the worst places to be if there is a major hurricane. So nothing in this article is new IMO except the author's B/S about it being caused entirely by human action. BTW - whether it is accepted or not humans and the things they create are a part of nature. If nature allows the presence of intelligent life, that life will advance itself.

definitely agree about the bias toward us ruining the world. I pretty much read right over that kind of nonsense now. It is so overdone. Interesting point about the Bay of Bengal....I just never thought much about that. Its a good day when I learn something new.

Any closed off area is a major risk in a bad hurricane. The water gets captured a lot more so it can't spread out like it would in the wider ocean off the east coast. I doubt that hurricane Katrina would have had as wide and high a storm surge on the Atlantic seaboard as it had in the GOM.

That makes sense too. I guess in the scheme of things, in a perfectly tranquil global environment, the water levels would all perfectly even out. Add in the contour of the land around and under it, wind and tide patterns, and the weather itself and I guess it does lend to some amount of inequality