Scientists are raising alarms that ice has vanished from the Greenland ice sheet in a dramatic melting event in recent weeks. So much so that the liquid released could cover the entire state of Florida with 2 inches of water.
Good news! Florida would be much improved.
It's all trivial. Life is going to get interesting - if not downright nerve-wracking - when the ice sheet starts sliding off in big chunks and floats away into warmer waters where it can melt faster and really start slowing down the Gulf Stream.
Fred Bloggs is usually pretty alarmist, but he seems to have missed that point. James Hansen published some stuff about this in 2016 and we did talk about it it here back then.
Since Greenland is bigger than Florida and the ice is more than 2 inches thick I don't know why it's surprising.
Since the oceans are bigger than Florida the ocean rise will be about 2 mils.
"Tom Del Rosso" snipped-for-privacy@that-google-mail-domain.com wrote in news:sen3bb$ojn$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
Except Greenland's ice is 2 MILES thick.
The great pumpkin WILL COME.
When it all slides off into the ocean, it will raise global sea levels by about 6 metres. Ice sheets don't melt in place (which would take quite a while) but break up and slide off in chunks. It happens quite fast when it happens.
There's about 6 metres of sea level rise in the Greenland ice sheet, and sea levels will rise quite rapidly - several metres per century - when the ice sheets starts sliding off into the ocean, if the end of the last ice age is anything to go by.
The ice sheets are not going to slide anywhere. They slowly melt into vast pools under the ice which then rapidly drain upon reaching a critical size. These previous AMOC collapses seem to coincide with large amounts of glacier melt, which should be a clue that abruptly adding lots of fresh water to the oceans, in the wrong places, has something to do with it. And that's exactly what's happening with Greenland.
There's not a lot of incoming heat to melt the ice into vast pools. Pools of water under the ice sheet do seem to eventually lubricate glacier flow - there is a heat gradient from the earth's core to the surface of the ice sheet and if the zero degree Celcius isotherm moves up into the ice sheet, glaciers do seem to flow rather faster.
The bottom of the Atlantic does seem to be littered with large "accidental" boulders which dropped out of melting ice bergs as they drifted south and melted in the ocean, so there does seem to have been a appreciable amount of sliding off going on from time to time in the past.
We'll just have to wait and see, but I'd lay off buying seafront property for the next century or two.
It needs quite a lot of fresh water. Draining the Great Lakes (when they were a good deal deeper behind ice dams that were part of the ice sheet) is a tempting hypothesis, but they were just part of the Laurentide ice sheet at the time - frozen solid, much like Greenland is today.
Sinks? Maybe melts. But ice doesn't sink.
The amusing point is that it never has to *melt* to cause sealevel rise; it just needs to slide off of the land masses supporting it and the effect will be felt (even if it NEVER melts).
Ice slides off land masses because it keeps snowing. If greenland grew into a 25,000 foot ice cone, it would interfere with airline traffic.
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