[Astralwalker]

Eurosceptic,

It’s like a glass of water with ice cubes. When those ice cubes melt, the water will flood the top of the glass. "

i thought the mass of and icecube was more so when they melt they actually take up less volume??

Your point is correct…but only if we are speaking of the observation when ice cubes are already in the glass which is not the case I was speaking about.


You are speaking when the ice cubes melt they will become liquid and they will use the same space the ice cubes were using and the water in the glass will not overflow.

It is totally correct, but only we are speaking of glass of water with few ice cubes. Our planet is not a glass of water filled with ice cubes…it has huge amounts of ice in the land mass, too.

Now…I guess You refer to this:

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

This experiment shows us how water and ice and volume and density have an interesting relationship.

Get a glass and put several ice cubes in it. (The glass should have straight sides - angled sides will get interfere with the ice and affect the experiment.)
Fill the glass up with water, almost to the top. Add a few more ice cubes. And one or two on top of those. You’re trying to get a pile of cubes suspended in the water, above the rim of the glass.

The water should be as full as you can get it without spilling over the rim of the glass:

What do you think will happen when the ice melts? The quick answer for some might be that the ice will melt, and that extra water will spill over the rim of the glass, overflowing the glass capacity.



It won’t.

Ice takes up more space than unfrozen, liquid water. The ice in the water displaces the water inside the glass. As the ice melts, that water and the surrounding water move to take up the newly-available space.
The perceived volume of water looks different when a bunch of the water is frozen. Knowing these differences between water and ice can help you better understand how much you’re drinking next time you drink ice water!

Now…when those Ice Cubes melted we got this situation>>





Now, when we add just one or two more Ice Cubes...



the result is this>>






I guess you were missing the point. I was talking the ice cubes that break from the land ice and fall into water.

More and more ice is breaking apart from the land mass and it’s getting into the oceans which influences the see level.

Only a small change in see level, causes changes in the planetary ocean equilibrium which influences the climate in many ways, but directly related to your question - flooding of the coastal continental regions etc.

Startrekka>>

The greater concern is the literal melting of the ice on land (be that glaciers around the world, or the Greenland, Iceland and Antarctic ice caps).

Exactly!











Two Trillion Tons of Land Ice Have Melted into Oceans Since 2003 from Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica!

Land water runoff since 2003 has raised global sea levels 1/5th inch.

“It's not getting better. It's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification. There's no reversal taking place.” - Jay Zwally, Ph.D., NASA Earth Observing System and ICE Satellite Project Scientist



Contrast ice (left) on land at Sermersuaq (or Humboldt) Glacier in Greenland, photographed by NASA’s Terra satellite on Aug. 31, 2000, and Aug. 30, 2008 (right).

More than 50% of melted landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite. Satellite images by NASA.



Take care,
Astralwalker