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Dr. Amber Jenkins

Amber Jenkins is Editor of NASA's Climate Change website and project manager of the Center for Climate Sciences at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's passionate about climate change, science and science communication.

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Climate change chronicles from NASA

Pick of the pics
Beautiful yet vulnerable
June 22, 2011
posted by Dr. Amber Jenkins
17:00 PDT
Pick of the pics
Image taken by NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on December 22, 2002.

This image shows the Malosmadulu Atolls, which are located in the Maldives, an island republic in the northern Indian Ocean, southwest of India. The Maldives is made up of a chain of 1192 small coral islands that are grouped into clusters of atolls. It has a population of about 330,000. Arguably the lowest-lying country in the world, the average elevation is 1 meter (3 feet) above sea level, and the Maldives is at serious risk of being inundated by rising sea level and storm surges. In an effort to prevent his archipelago nation from literally drowning, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed is pushing to make the islands carbon-neutral by 2020.

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