Can someone calculate the height of polar caps that would have to melt to raise the sea level one inch? If you have the data, this is not a hard calculation. Help me out here.
The arctic ice cap is suspended in water so when it melts annually the sea level is not affected. Only glacier that cover a land mass will raise sea levels. I read if the glaciers that cover Greenland melted completely then the sea level would rise 100 ft. There is a huge volume of water over Greenland.
There is only one polar ice cap.
The ice in the Arctic is floating on water. If it melted in its entirety, it would not raise the sea level a single inch.
The ice in the Antarctic is chiefly in areas where the temperature never exceeds -100 degrees farenheit. So it could never plausible melt.
Whatever increase in sea level occurs will be the result of melting around the southern edges of Greenland, or by the expansion of water molecules as they warm. Neither will be that significant, less than a foot.
Antarctica is 5.4 million square miles.
Greenland is 0.8 million square miles.
The first oceans are 139.7 million square miles.
So it would take 22.5 inches of ice melting to raise the ocean one inch.
This skipped less than 100% ice coverage of the land and lower density of ice. Both would increase the ice melt needed slightly.
A few years later, some Scandinavian kid found the box at a beach.
That suggests that "new" precipitation displaces the less-than-new cover off the ice cap.
I have no idea about the balance between the thickness, that is, what melts on the bottom versus how new cover is integrated onto the cap.
16.302915 Meters