Replies

The glacier is bigger and thinning faster than all the others in East Antarctica. It contains enough ice to raise the global sea level by at least 11 feet (3.4 meters), according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin

This tripped my bogometer. Let's do the back-of-the-envelope calculation here...

Surface area of the world's oceans: 357,000,000 km^2.

What is the volume of the Totten Glacier? Wikipedia claims it is 538,000 km^2 (which seems high to me, but let's use it anyway). Assume 5.38x10^5. Ratio is 664-to-1. So to raise the ocean by 3.4 meters would require that the glacier be at least 664*3.4 = 2,250 meters deep. Actually since ice is only 91% as dense as water the glacier needs to be 2473 meters high.

And this glacier must somehow melt completely and all of that melt must somehow get dumped into the ocean (forgetting whatever ridges or mountain ranges are in the way.) And remember it needs to be subtracted from the height of the crust underneath it that is itself already well above sea level.

The article is bullshit.

Yes. One of the things that bother me the most about global warming alarmists is that they talk about ALL of Antarctic ice melting.

I'd wager that even a 2 degree over a century rise in temperatures wouldn't make a friggin DENT in the Antarctic.

Now if you took a thousand degree blowtorch to Antarctica, we'd have something to talk about.

But that won't happen until the sun turns red giant.

In about a billion years.