You've likely heard about the effects that climate change
is having on our planet and specifically in the Arctic
which is warming twice as fast,but what would actually
happen if all the ice melted on earth.
source of photo :https://www.wikipedia.org/
I can help with that when you and I drink water we drink non salty
water we,drink fresh water.Now of all the water
in the world most of it is salty,just 3% is not salty.
Now if that 3%,you can't get to most of that because
70% of that 3% it's frozen 30 million cubic kilometers
of frozen water and it's so much frozen water,so much ice
and if you had a layer of it thousandmeters thick,it would
cover North America that's a lot of frozen water people.
source of photo :https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-thaw-a-frozen-bottle-of-water/
On land frozen water forms glaciers,ice sheets,permafrost
and snow but the Arctic is largely ocean so there
it takes the form of floating sea ice like icebergs and
because it's in direct contact with warming waters sea
ice will be the first to melt as global temperatures rise
in fact NASA reported that the extent of Arctic sea
ice was the lowest ever recorded for January,February,
April,May and June 2016 so the world is getting warmer
and the ice is melting.
source of photo:https://sciencing.com/how-does-polar-ice-melting-affect-the-environment-13400295.html
Pretty soon you'll be able to drive your ship from Europe to
Russia,right over the North Pole,with no ice in the way.That's
good for certain shipping companies maybe,but for the marine
species:the polar bears,the walruses,the seals! They don't have their
old habitats. They're all going away,there are melting
out from them.And ocean dwelling animals like bowhead
whales and narwhals aren't immune to these changes either.
As sea ice melts energy and oil companies are taking it
as an opportunity to search further north for untapped
resources.Using a process known as seismic blasting they
shoot air explosions into the water in an effort to map
the ocean floor and find oil.Of course,this has detrimental
effects on the whole ecosystem of the Arctic Ocean while
also causing physical trauma and habitat relocation in whales.
source of photo:https://www.star2.com/living/2018/04/30/new-rules-would-make-it-easier-to-find-oil-in-the-us-and-noisier-for-whales/
source of photo:https://www.star2.com/living/2018/04/30/new-rules-would-make-it-easier-to-find-oil-in-the-us-and-noisier-for-whales/
In terms of sea levels,melting sea ice won't have much of an
effect.This is because the floating ice already displaces
roughly the same amount of water as it would produce when
it melts,so that effect would be negligible.Furthermore,
the majority of Earth's ice,more than 95% is land-based
and contained mostly in enormous ice sheets that cover
Greenland and Antarctica where there are entire mountain
ranges almost as big as the Alps completely buried in ice.
source of photo :https://www.disclose.tv/russia-reveals-antarctica-is-not-what-were-being-told-315867
So,what if all the ice on land melts? If all this ice melts,
the ocean is going to have more water in it.So the sea levels,as
measured from the coasts,is going to go up. It's going to go
up 70 metres.That's a long way people.Half the world's
citizens live on sea coasts.That's where the Commerce action
is.So they're gonna have to move! Where are they gonna go? And
who's gonna pay for it? Tokyo,New York,Sao Paulo,Mumbai,
Shanghai and Jakarta are all coastal and happened to be
some of the world's biggest cities.Even a small sea-level
rise of only a couple feet could cause up to a trillion dollars
worth of flood damage per year.A rise of 10 meters would
displace more than 630 million people nearly 10% of the world's
population.At 25 meters, 1.4 billion people,roughly 20% of
humanity is left homeless and to visualize the full 70
meters,the rising seas would drown out most of the US eastern
seaboard,much of the West coast,the entire state of
Florida,huge areas of Asia including Bangladesh and much of
Northern China and create a new inland sea in Australia.
At the North and South pole of the Earth we have a lot of ice.
source of photo:The World After Sea-Level Rise - YouTube
Ice reflects sunlight into space.But there's a feedback
mechanism,one thing leading to another.As the world gets warmer
the ice melts.As the ice melts it's reflecting less sunlight
into space which lets the world get warmer still.
The sunlight is absorbed by the dark, liquid ocean.So as the
ice melts world gets warmer.And the sea gets fresher.
Currently the world's oceans are criss crossed by a set of
currents that act like a giant conveyor belt.And these
currents are powered in part by the differences in the
saltiness between one part of the ocean and another.So,if a
melting ice sheet in Greenland dumps a whole bunch of
non-salty,freshwater into the North Atlantic it's possible
that it could disrupt the currents.So the conveyor belt takes
chemicals,takes nutrients around the world,which feed
plankton,which feed fish,which feed us. Half of the oxygen
you breathe is made by plants in the oceans.You don't want
to mess with this.Furthermore,as that sea surface gets
warmer,off of Greenland, the Gulf Stream will probably shift a
little bit,and if that shifts,what keeps Europe warm
right now,May not keep Europe as warned.So the crops are gonna
have to be grown elsewhere and who's gonna grow them and
who's gonna ship them around and who's gonna feed each
other and what's goin on?! This is serious business! When you
go melting the ice. We actually went up to the Arctic to see
the current state of things first hand while documenting at all and were
absolutely shocked by what we found.
If you want to see more science posts, keep following up.
REFERENCES:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17145
https://usclivar.org/amoc/organization/amoc-science-team
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2554
https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/melting-arctic-sea-ice-and-ocean-circulation
https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/drown-your-town-what-does-your-hometown-look-like-with-sea-level-rise/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956247807076960?ssource=mfc&rss=1&
https://watchers.news/2013/01/29/rising-sea-level-will-displace-a-substantial-fraction-of-the-human-population/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438?storyId=9162438
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/08/rising-sea-levels-threaten-over-a-trillion-dollars-worth-of-us-homes/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1979
https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/rising-sea-level
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/oceansicerocks/iceandclimate.html
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/11/111116-antarctica-mountains-mystery-ice-science-earth/
https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-continue-to-break-records