Let's say Earth is a sphere mostly true—it's actually wider around the equator with a radius of 6. I can calculate the surface area of this sphere. For this surface area, about 70 percent is water which is crazy if you think about it. That means the surface area of the oceans can be calculated as:. Imagine this melted ice otherwise known as water spread over the whole area of the oceans. If the ocean was a perfect square, the melted water would be a flat rectangular box with the same area as the ocean and the depth equal to the amount of sea level rise.
To find this rise in water, I just need to take the volume of melted water and divide by the area of the ocean and here you can see why it's nice to have everything in units of meters, m 2 and m 3. OK, now I'm going to reveal my favorite tool for calculations like this—python. Yes, I did all of this with some very short python code.
The best part is that you can change any of my estimates. Just click the "pencil" icon and you can input values that you think are better. I won't be offended or even know. View Iframe URL. So you see how bad this could be. Even if my estimates are off by a little bit—it seems clear that there could be a very significant sea level rise.
That would suck. Note that this is just an approximation. I didn't take into account the loss of land surface area that gets flooded by the rising seas. This would actually decrease the sea level rise, as it would have a greater area to spread out.
But even if you let the water spread over a complete Earth including the land , it would be an increase of 62 meters feet. I guess I should also point out that I ignored the curvature of the Earth and assumed it was a flat plat the flat-Earthers would be happy.
But since the change in sea level is very small compared to the radius of the Earth, I think this approximation is fairly fine. Well, fine as an estimation—not fine as the disaster it would cause. But what about the melting ice at the North Pole? Although there is significant melting , it doesn't contribute to sea level rise. The big difference is that the Arctic ice is floating while the Antarctic ice is sitting on land.
Why does this even matter? I can show you with an example of a classic physics question. Imagine you have a glass of water with a single large ice cube in it. Since the density of solid ice is slightly less than the density of liquid water, the ice floats. Here is a diagram of the floating ice. Why does stuff float? I know this might seem crazy, but it's because of the gravitational force.
Imagine that you have a glass of water without any motion in the cup no currents. You can take a small section of the water in the middle of the cup and look at the forces acting on it. Let's say this is a small cube of water with each side of length s. So, the melt of the ice which is already in water will not change the sea level melting of the sea ice for example but the sea level will rise if the ice was not initially in the sea.
This is the case for melting of the ice sheet. Melting ice shelves will not raise sea level by themselves, but ice shelves are important indirectly to sea level, as they slow down glaciers that drain the ice sheets that are on land and above sea level.
If an ice shelf melts, the glaciers they were holding back slide into the ocean more quickly. And this is what raises sea levels. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Type and press enter to search. You know, the ones that supply our drinking water, irrigation systems, and power-plant cooling systems? All those aquifers would be destroyed.
Not good. This will wreak havoc on our ocean currents and weather patterns. Take the Gulf Stream, for example. It's a strong ocean current that brings warm air to northern Europe and relies on dense, salty water from the Arctic in order to function. But a flood of freshwater would dilute the current and could weaken or even stop it altogether. Without that warm air, temperatures in northern Europe would plummet, and that could spawn a mini ice age, according to some experts. That's not even the worst of it.
The Himalayan glaciers specifically pose one of the largest threats because of what's trapped inside: toxic chemicals like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. Scientists discovered that glaciers like this can store these chemicals for decades. But as they thaw, those glaciers release the chemicals into rivers, lakes, and groundwater reserves, poisoning each one as they go. Permafrost is organic matter that's been frozen in the ground for two-plus years.
Now, one of the most immediate problems with thawing permafrost would be mercury poisoning. That's right: There are an estimated 15 million gallons of mercury stored up in the Arctic permafrost. That's almost equal to the amount of mercury everywhere else on Earth.
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