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To: TonyRo76
The melting of the ice caps is, as you said, another fiction. Antarctica's average ice depth is puffed up by the submerged ice (where most of Antarctica's ice is), which, if it melted, would not do anything to sealevel, other than possibly slightly reducing them. Furthermore, the oceans don't rise due to warming at depth (that's the latest non-factual claim to which the global warming demagogues have retreated) -- the oceans don't warm at depth, they get colder and heavier with minerals and whatnot with depth.
41 posted on 08/16/2004 9:00:27 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Unlike some people, I have a profile. Okay, maybe it's a little large...)
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To: SunkenCiv
"The melting of the ice caps is, as you said, another fiction. Antarctica's average ice depth is puffed up by the submerged ice (where most of Antarctica's ice is), which, if it melted, would not do anything to sealevel, other than possibly slightly reducing them. Furthermore, the oceans don't rise due to warming at depth (that's the latest non-factual claim to which the global warming demagogues have retreated) -- the oceans don't warm at depth, they get colder and heavier with minerals and whatnot with depth."

I believe you are confusing the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Arctic ice cap covers an ocean (conveniently named the Arctic Ocean) and the Antarctic ice cap covers a continental land mass (called Antarctica).

As far as the effect of melting the ice caps goes, you said "if it melted, would not do anything to sealevel, other than possibly slightly reducing them." Ignoring the effects of warming at depth of the water itself (due to the sheer amount of energy involved being enough to sterilize the planet anyway) and discounting the negligible effect of dissolved salts on the total volume of the solution (the volume of the dissolved salts would be effectively constant as seawater is not at saturation) there would be some increase in the total volume of the solution (the world ocean) and therefore some rise in sea level.

Consider the following: an ice cube floating in a glass of water. What happens to the level of the water when the ice cube melts? Well, we know that the ice cube displaces its own weight of water - that is how it floats. Therefore, the portion of the ice cube that is below the water line occupies a volume equal to the volume of water that weighs the same as the ice cube. Since the ice cube is made of water, if it melted it would exactly fill the portion of its own volume that was below the water line before it melted. So the water level in the glass (sea level) will not change when the ice cube melts.

But that only accounts for floating ice. What about those portions of the ice cap that are on land, or resting on the bottom where the ocean is shallow? In that case, where the ice is displacing less than its own weight of water, it would contribute to a net rise in sea level. This effect is probably negligible for the Arctic as there is little land area there and the Arctic Ocean is deep enough that the permanent ice cap reaches the bottom in few areas. The big concern would be if the Antarctic ice cap melted. Virtually all of it sits on top of Antarctica. This would cause the oceans to rise substantially. Of course, to melt the 26.4 billion cubic meters of ice in the Antarctic ice cap would take 2.4 trillion kilowatt-hours just to melt 0 degree (Celsius) ice to 0 degree water. That doesn't include warming all that ice up to the verge of melting in the first place.
69 posted on 08/16/2004 11:15:50 PM PDT by calenel (Peace Through Strength, and when necessary, Peace Through Victory!)
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