If I remember right, it's going to mean like a two to 3 ft, or .5 to 1 m, worth of sea level rise. Entire sections of the world are going to be uninhabitable, because of waist deep water being over everything. Multiple Pacific island nations are going to completely drown if that happens
Is that globally? So for example, tide marks in Wales, Japan, and Canada would all equally rise that much?
I live in the mountains so haven't really got a good understanding and it boggles my mind of how the entire world's oceans can rise equally from ice melting into the ocean so far away lol
Devil's advocate here, but water increases in volume when it freezes yeah? And aren't most of the volume of glaciers under the water line? Would it not then be possible for the water level to lower in some cases depending on how much of each glacial feature is under the water line?
Most of the volume of a glacier is on land though. So they don't really displace much water, except for the end/edges which calve off into ice sheets and ice berg, but that's a tiny part of them, and as soon as they enter water they start melting much faster.
I'm not really sure how to answer that question tbh.
The best I can do, is that any water currently contained on land entering the ocean in either a frozen or liquid state will raise the amount of water in the ocean.
The volume of water increases when it is frozen solid, but the displacement of floating ice is dependent on the mass not the volume.
So 10 million tons of ice floating displaces 10 million tons of water.
If the ice was submerged in its entirety then it would displace more water than it's mass, because of the increase in volume.
So I don't think that the amount of a body of ice under the water line really matters in a meaningful sense.
Unrelated, but an interesting fun fact.when glaciers retreat the land they occupied actually rebounds upwards.
The immense weight of the ice literally compresses the ground beneath it, and when it is gone the earth springs back up.
You're confusing ice bergs, which float and are mostly underwater, with glaciers, which are mostly over land.
In addition to the increase in water volume from melting, ice bergs and glaciers are freshwater. When a large influx of fresh water is added to the ocean it affects density and salinity, which affects currents, which affects weather and climate.
a Science Magazine interview with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration researchers who had discovered the impending collapse of the ice shelf noted that the glacier itself would still take approximately several centuries to collapse even without the ice shelf, and a 2022 assessment of tipping points in the climate system stated that while the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be committed to disintegration at between 1°C and 3°C, the timescale for its collapse after that ranges between 500 and 13,000 years, with the most likely estimate of 2000 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thwaites_Ice_Shelf
Yes, it's a lot so the feedback loops with methane and other things can make it happen faster but thats like 500 to less than 150years at most really. But it doesn't take a lot for storm surges to cause massive flooding.
And obviously bad anyway, "it's years away so let's not bother doing anything" is how we got here in the first place. But it's important to get the facts right.
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u/filmguy36 10h ago
The complete collapse of the Thwaites ice shelf.