If Global Warming is real, and I'm not saying it isn't, would Sea level raise or drop?

Question

I know this might sound like a stupid question because most of you are thinking right now "The ice is going to melt and raise Sea level". But, I have a theory. For example, you have a glass of water. You put 3 ice cubes in and the water raises. If you take them out it drops. My theory is it will not be effected. Because the Sea level will drop without the volume of the ice and it will raise because of the extra water remaining about the same. What do you think?

Answer 1

see, you have a good, but flawed theory.  the polar caps go above sea level, so they arent all in the ocean. that means when the caps melt, as well as all the glaciers on land, the water will travel into the ocean, thus raising the sea level  

Answer 2

Sea levels might raise a millimeter or two.

Here is truth about global warming:

Global warming is one-half of the climatic cycle of warming and cooling.

The earth's mean temperature cycles around the freezing point of water.

This is a completely natural phenomenon which has been going on since there has been water on this planet. It is driven by the sun.

Our planet is currently emerging from a 'mini ice age', so is

becoming warmer and may return to the point at which Greenland is again usable as farmland (as it has been in recorded history).

As the polar ice caps decrease, the amount of fresh water mixing with oceanic water will slow and perhaps stop the thermohaline cycle (the oceanic heat 'conveyor' which, among other things, keeps the U.S. east coast warm).

When this cycle slows/stops, the planet will cool again and begin to enter another ice age.

It's been happening for millions of years.

The worrisome and brutal predictions of drastic climate effects are based on computer models, NOT CLIMATE HISTORY.

As you probably know, computer models are not the most reliable of sources, especially when used to 'predict' chaotic systems such as weather.

Global warming/cooling, AKA 'climate change':

Humans did not cause it.

Humans cannot stop it.

Answer 3

Try this.  Put three ice cubes in a glass of water, then mark the level of the water with a piece of tape or something.  Now wait till the ice cubes melt and see where the water level is.  Higher?  Lower? The same?  Are you surprised?

Answer 4

The sea level will rise, but not because of ice burgs.  Ice burgs are already in the water so the volume wouldn't change essentially.

The reason the sea will rise though is because glaciers from mountains will melt and flow down the rivers and into the sea.

Answer 5

you are right to some extent but you are not completely right...see when glaciers will melt they will be there in oceans and will incerase the water level. if you put three cubes into the full glass of water and you let them melt their in glass the water level definately increase..and think about it on the higher scale...it just not a glass of water...

Answer 6

Global warming is a con game for economic and political power by a group of politicians around the world. It has not happened, will not happen and cannot happen and anybody with even an average high school education should know better or our schools are in worse shape than I thought they were. The sea level rise happened 11,000 years ago when the ice age ended and the mile high glaciers melted. Global warming or climate change as they now call it is on about the same level of truth as the Nigerian email scam or those emails supposedly from your bank wanting you to reenter your security information so they can clean you out. So be careful if you accept the AGW scam you are prime meat for any of the rash of identity theft email scams out there.  

Answer 7

I''m not sure if I fully grasped your idea correctly but from what I get I'm pretty sure your theory is right

Answer 8

What you refer to is the theory of buoyancy, a foating object displaces it down weight in water, sea ice has already displaced its own weight, so when it melts nothing happens, just like a glass with ice in.

If all the sea ice melted sea level would not change, but land ice has not displaced its own weight, so if that melts it will add to sea levels.

If all the glaciers, perma frost and greenland ice melted the estimated volume of ice divided by the surface of the ocean equates to a 5mm rise in sea level.

If the antarctic ice where to melt, the estimated volume divided by the area of the sea results in around 6m, though it would actually be less as the seas area would increase with level. This is the very worst case and would not occur without significent warming far greater than that predicted and it would take thousands of years to happen.

There is also another issue at play, which is thermal expansion caused by the warming of the sea. As sea temperature increase the theory is that the level rises, though only by a small amount with each degree.

So based on the above there is a theory that warming will result in raised sea levels, however, there are some other theories. One is that with warming evaporation increases which keeps sea levels constant, the increased evaporation will result in increased snow fall at the poles and increased ice mass.

What we do know based on observations is that sea levels have barely changed over the last few hundred years of warming and recently have been falling rather than rising, but temperatures have been decreasing aswell.

I believe that warming will result in increased sea levels but in the range of 10s of mm rather than Al Gores and the IPCC predictions of several meters in the next 100 years. The original IPCC report predicted a 1m rise by this point in time and it hasnt happened so it just demonstrates know yet fully knows what will happen

Answer 9

I don't know the physics as well as I should, but ice that's FLOATING already in water should displace about as much water as it will contribute to the total volume when it melts.

Ice that's resting on LAND, however, does not displace any water.

So when * already floating * sea ice melts, the level of the oceans remains virtually the same.  

However, when ice on land melts and the water flows into the ocean, the level of the ocean will rise -- just because there's more water there.

To take your example of the ice in a glass of water, when we melt a glacier on LAND, it's as if we've picked up some ice from the refrigerator, or from a completely different glass, and we've put it into your glass.  

That means we've added to the total volume of water in the glass, whether it's frozen or not.  And so the water in the glass will rise.

That's what we do when we take ice that's been sitting on top of the Swiss Alps, say, or on some mountain top in Antarctica, and we either melt it and allow the water to flow into the ocean, or if we plop the ice itself into the ocean.  That's totally different from melting ice that's been floating in the ocean already.

Why is this important in terms of global warming?  

The ice now captured in mountain glaciers around the world -- in the Alps, Andes, Himalayas, the various ranges of Alaska, etc. -- is now resting on LAND, not on water.

So is most of the ice in the gigantic Greenland ice cap.

So is most of the ice -- not all of it, but most of it -- in Antarctica.

As global warming occurs, the prediction is that many or most of the mountain glaciers around the world will melt -- in fact, many of them are already melting now.

If warming continues long enough, and average temperatures rise high enough, an increasing volume of the Greenland ice cap will melt as well.  Finally, if the temperature gets really high, we should see melting of some significant fraction of the Antarctic ice sheet.

This sort of melting will cause water/ice that's now supported on LAND to flow into the OCEANS, and it should raise ocean levels quite a lot.  

There is enough ice in the Greenland ice cap, for instance, to raise average sea/ocean levels by something like 6 meters or 20 feet if it all melts and flows into the ocean.

There is enough ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet alone to raise average sea levels by another 5 meters or about 16 feet, if it all melts.

Taking all of Antarctica into account, there is enough water trapped in the total Antarctic ice cap to raise sea levels by around 60 meters or more -- more than 190 feet -- if the ice of the whole continent were to melt.  However, none of the scientists expect this to happen for hundreds or even thousands of years.

In addition to melting, there's another climate-related risk connected to glacier ice that's now resting on land.  Ice is heavy, and in most cases glacier ice flows slowly downhill in the direction of the oceans under the pressure of gravity.

In Greenland, scientists now think there's a risk of warmer temperatures causing the rate of flow towards the ocean to speed up, even if temperatures don't get hot enough to melt the entire ice cap.

Why?  When surface ice starts to melt on the tops of the Greenland glaciers, the meltwater forms little lakes, and crevices in the ice known as "moulins" then can allow the melt water to percolate down through the ice to the bedrock below.

When the meltwater from the surface of the Greenland glaciers reaches bedrock, some researchers believe, it is providing more lubrication for the glaciers as they flow towards the ocean.  

With more water beneath them to reduce the friction caused by their weight pushing against the bedrock, the glaciers then accelerate.

Presto: more ice drops into the North Atlantic faster, and the total volume of water in the oceans increases.

A growing number of climate scientists therefore fear that even though the climate won't warm enough in the 21st century to melt much of the Greenland ice outright, there will be enough melting to speed up the rate at which the ice gets dumped into the water -- causing a speed up in the rate of sea level rise.

There are similar concerns about the collapse of floating ice off the coasts of West Antarctica that you may have seen recently on television.

A few years ago, for example, the Larsen "B" sheet of floating ice off West Antarctica suddenly collapsed in a matter of weeks, creating many new icebergs.  This in itself added nothing to sea level, or not much, since the Larsen "B" ice sheet was floating already.

But in the view of some scientists, the Larsen B sheet and others like it have acted like a "cork" in a bottle -- providing a floating barrier that resists the pressure of big land-based glaciers behind it.  

The ice "cork" or barrier keeps these land-based glaciers from flowing into the ocean and creating new ice bergs as rapidly as they otherwise would

Answer 10

Raise the temperature of the water and it will expand.