Global Warming Doomers,I have a Question....

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Are You saying when the Ice melts due to Global Warming,large Areas of the Globe will be under Water?I think levelling Hills and filling in low lying Areas are much more of a Problem. Now, as most of You know,filling a Glass Bottle with Water and freezing it,will break the Bottle due to Expansion of the Ice,right?Since most of the Polar Ice is near Sea Level and below,would it not reasonable to assume,that Water replacing the Ice would actually lower the Sea Level,now that Water is filling in the Volume that the Ice occupied before??

-- H H N (name@none.com), April 23, 2000

Answers

When ice that is floating on water (such as in the Arctic Ocean and in the ocean ice shelf around Antarctica, but not on the continent of Antarctica itself) melts, the sea level is unchanged. Floating ice displaces its own mass of water, so when it is replaced by the equivalent mass of water, contracting as it melts, there is no net change in the water level.

Only the melting of ice that is currently on ground, not floating, will affect (raise) the sea level. Examples: glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, the continent of Antarctica.

Lowering the sea level would require that water evaporating from the oceans condense as snow and ice that accumulates on top of land without melting and running back to the ocean. This happened during past Ice Ages.

There is another effect of warming of the ocean, separate from the effect of ice melting.

Liquid water is densest at about 39 degrees Fahrenheit. As it either cools below or warms above that point, it expands. The rate of this expansion is much slower than the dramatic expansion at 32 degrees Fahrenheit as liquid water freezes to solid water, but it is nevertheless measurable.

The current average temperature of the world's ocean water is a little above 39 degrees Fahrenheit. As global warming includes the warming of ocean water, that water will expand, thus raising sea level, as a separate effect from the melting of ice.

-- No Spam Please (nos_pam_please@hotmail.com), April 23, 2000.


All this begs the question of whether there really is such a thing as Global Warming anyway.

-- Richard Dymond (omicron@zoom.co.uk), April 26, 2000.

Most of the ice is sitting on top of the land. When it melts, the oceans will rise.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), April 26, 2000.

Since there were no "ice ages", speculation on what will or won't happen if the polar caps melt (NOT!) is pointless.

All signs of the supposed "ice ages" are marks of the Deluge.

Answers in Genesis

-- Bible Thumper (Jesus@is.God), April 26, 2000.


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