How much will the oceans rise if all the sea ice melts?

The angle is 106 degrees.

And yes, it is roughly correct to say water is densest at 4 degrees Celcius, while still a liquid, but weird things happen to it when it's supercooled:


But below -120 degrees Celsius, it's possible to make what's known as ultraviscous water, a liquid as thick as molasses. Below -135 degrees Celsius comes glassy water, a solid having no crystal structure.

sorry, am on tiny screen and messed up the cut and paste - here is the link
http://www.digibio.com/archive/RedHerring_com-Why_water_is_weird.htm

Thanks for the correction on the angle.
K
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So what? What does this have to do with the original question--
HOW MUCH WILL THE OCEANS RISE IF ALL THE SEA ICE MELTS-

Or,don't you pay attention to such niceties, Diest?

If you don't understand the scientific properites of water Possum, how do you expect to understand how sea levels will behave when the composition/ratio of vapor, liquid and solid change?

You may not care, but it is relevant to the question.

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Re: Diest TKO (Post 3577464)
So what? What does this have to do with the original question--
HOW MUCH WILL THE OCEANS RISE IF ALL THE SEA ICE MELTS-

Or,don't you pay attention?

Instead of the irrelevant Bullshit written by Herr Diest TKO, here is the answer to the question:

Re: qwik1320 (Post 3570900)
14. How much does sea level rise if all the world's ice melts?
To a first approximation, if all the floating sea ice in the world melted, there would be no change in sea level at all, as the floating ice will have displaced its own weight of water. However, if land ice melts, that will raise sea level. All the world's glaciers and small ice caps contain approximately 0.5 m of sea level equivalent between them, while the great Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain approximately 7 and 61 m respectively. Consequently, if all the wolrd's ice melted in a very much warmer world, sea level would be approximately 70 m higher.

However, when land ice melts the distribution of the mass of water around the global ocean is by no means uniform. A large melting would result in a modification in the Earth's gravity field which would result in the sea level change being higher in some places than in others. [return to top]

What would it be at high tide. That's the crucial matter surely.

Nope. Test it. Put ice cubes in a glass, fill the glass to the rim. When the ice melts, the water level will be exactly the same.

If a portion of the ice is above the water level, that part of the ice will contribute to new volume of water when the ice melts. If no part of the ice is above water the level will not be changed.

Volume is a spacial measure. Vtotal = Vice + Vwater. If a portion of the ice is above the water level, it does not contribute to the displacement of water. When the ice melts the net volume will not change, but now the ice that was previously above the water will now be contributing to the water level. If you were to mark the water level of a glass with a piece of ice partially above water, you'd find that that level of displacement is not equal to the total volume of the ice + water. If however, the ice is fully submerged then the water level will represent a volume equal to the total volume of ice + water.

The experiment you are referring to must assume that the ice in the cup is not buoyant to the point where there is ice exposed above the water level. In that case, you'd be correct that the water level would be unchanged.

As per genoves butthurt tantrums, The water level if all the ice were to melt cannot simply be represented in terms of new liquid water but also the expansion of liquid water as a function of temp. Cyclo pointed this out a while back.

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T
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TKO.
DD is technically correct. Because ice has a larger volume than water it's density is less. The lower density causes some of the ice to be above the water line.

The ice below the water line takes up the same space as the volume of the water of the total ice. The ice above the water line does not affect the water level when melted.

You know what, I forgot about that. I forgot to account for the trapped gasses etc in the ice that drops it's density due to suspension. The ice above water would only raise the water level if the buoyancy was due to some sort of agent like salt in the water augmenting the density, and therefore making the ice more buoyant.

My bad. I knew there was a detail I was missing.

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Er... There are no trapped gasses. Water ice is simply less dense than liquid water. Take a pint of water, freeze it, and it will take up a greater volume.

Instead of the irrelevant Bullshit written by Herr Diest TKO, here is the answer to the question:

Re: qwik1320 (Post 3570900)
14. How much does sea level rise if all the world's ice melts?
To a first approximation, if all the floating sea ice in the world melted, there would be no change in sea level at all, as the floating ice will have displaced its own weight of water. However, if land ice melts, that will raise sea level. All the world's glaciers and small ice caps contain approximately 0.5 m of sea level equivalent between them, while the great Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain approximately 7 and 61 m respectively. Consequently, if all the wolrd's ice melted in a very much warmer world, sea level would be approximately 70 m higher.

However, when land ice melts the distribution of the mass of water around the global ocean is by no means uniform. A large melting would result in a modification in the Earth's gravity field which would result in the sea level change being higher in some places than in others. [return to top]

Solid ice typically has some vacancies and some trapped gasses. I'm am familiar with the expansion of water in it's solid form. That's what I was getting at earlier with the whole buoyancy bit.

Salt water is more dense than distiled water. So if you put a ice cube in salt water it will displace less water and more of the ice will be above water.

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Did you forget you posted this?



Ice is less dense than liquid water. The specific gravity of ice means the volume of ice below water equals the volume of liquid water for the ice above and below water.

But it will still displace only the amount of water equal to its own liquid volume.

Tks for trying to inject some civility in this discussion! I've a query on the land ice, however: underground acquifers worldwide (from Arizona to Saudi Arabia to China) have been dropping precipitously, sometimes by hundreds of feet since measurements started, as more and more water is pumped out.

Since the land ice would melt on land, by definition, some of it would serve to replenish these acquifers. We'd need expert hydrologists and geologists to answer that question for each and every site examined.

As to sea ice, yes, the trapped gas would make some difference, but fundamentally oceanic thermohaline circulation is enormously complex, with relative temperature and salinity only 2 of a vast number of model inputs - with unknown correlation coefficients, though some may be orthogonal.

Warming in and of itself doesn't worry me in the least, and - since so many here don't know it - CO2 is a harmless gas. The overwhelming danger is from heavy metals - mercury, lead, etc - in the oceans. Already the Arctic animals like seals and bears have toxic levels of mercury in their blood - the consequences for their progeny and for other creatures who feed on them, like whales and dolphins, are catastrophic. Overpopulation (human) leading to overfishing of even "safe" fish stocks, is the other possibly catastrophic factor.

Letting all the ice - land or water based - melt is the least of our worries.

Only if it melts in an aquifer recharge zone.

According to Archimedes's principle, any ice that floats on the oceans displaces its own weight in water, so has no impact on sea levels when it melts. It's the ice on top of land masses that will raise sea levels.