Tarawa, the capital atoll of Kiribati, has lost food gardens and roads as the tides continue to climb its sea-walls and wash over the island that is no more than five metres (16 feet) at its highest point.

Big high tides are forecast again at the end of this month with the full moon.

Radio Kiribati reported Sunday that the tides were threatening people who can only watch helplessly as they sweep across the narrow islands.

Kiribati is a Micronesian nation of 90,000 spread over 33 atolls on the Equator. Around 33,000 people live on Tarawa atoll, most of them in high density, simple traditional housing on the southern islets.

It sits in the middle a band of warming water associated with the El Nino, a disruption of the oceanic and atmospheric systems with global consequences.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says their data pointed to a deepening El Nino.

Kiribatis strange tides confirm this, said Wolfgang Scherer, director of the Australian National Tidal Facility, which maintains tidal monitoring facilities across the South Pacific.

The big events were not so-called spring tides or king tides, he told AFP.

"However, early in the year preceding an El Nino, typically about March, the sea level in Kiribati rises 15-20 centimetres (5.9 to 7.8 inches) as a precursor to the El Nino, and then drops with the onset of an El Nino to as low as about 20 centimetres below the mean sea level," he said.

Their predictions warn Tarawa that on April 27 and 28 -- the full moon -- the high tides will reach up to 2.73 metres (8.9 feet), 2.63 metres (8.6 feet) and 2.74 metres (8.9 feet). On March 29 they were hit with a 2.8 metre (9.1 feet) high tide.

Radio Kiribati said the tides have flooded residential areas, pigpens, gardens and roads.

One of the islands few tourist facilities, the Lagoon Breeze Motel, has been badly flooded.

The state owned radio said the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific nursery garden, once fully green and healthy with plants, was left with nothing but dead plants and salty soil.

A number of sea-walls collapsed and roads were flooded from both the lagoon and ocean sides.

Although Radio Kiribati blamed global warming and an associated sea-level rise, experts link it strongly to El Nino and an odd characteristic of the area, and in particular Tarawa.

The high tides flood into its wide lagoon and the water tends to back up, then sweeping out across the land. The situation has been made worse by causeways linking the southern islets of the atoll.

Tarawas tides played a crucial part in World War II when the US staged a key landing there to throw the Japanese off. The landing Marines ignored warnings of the atoll's infamous "dodging tides" and were forced to walk through a heavy hail of fire across the unexpectedly shallow lagoon.

The Allies took Tarawa but at the price of 1,027 dead Americans, and the annihilation of most of the 4,800 Japanese garrison.

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