Here’s some cocktail napkin math.
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My version of napkin math to illustrate stupidity:
Surface area of Earth = 197,000,000 square miles
Surface area of Florida = 65,800 square miles
Earth has close to 3000 X surface area of Florida.
If the entire earth is to be covered in a blanket of 16 feet of water, then the depth of the chunk of ice (area of Florida) needs to be 3000 x 16’ = 48,000 feet = 9+ miles thick.
Complete and utter bull crap. Unless of course you believe men can get pregnant.
If all of Greeland’s ice melted, sea levels would rise by about 25 to 30 feet. So what they’re saying about this Antarctic ice is that if all of it melted, it would raise sea levels by 16 feet, implying that it has about half the ice mass of Antarctica. That seems reasonable but the rise would not be just from that ice breaking away, it would also have to melt. A lot of it would probably just merge with the pack ice that surrounds Antarctica now. I’m not convinced that the result would be a rapid rise, more like a gradual rise of some fraction of the 16 feet. Not saying that would be great because even five feet would be a nasty outcome.
Also we have no real idea if the Thwaites glacier will all detach, or what fraction of that might melt.
My advice would be to develop response plans for sea level rises of all magnitudes, and to research ways of capturing water from melting ice for irrigation. If vast chunks of Antarctic ice could be towed to regions that need water, then they could melt in a more useful place than the southern ocean.
I am not scoffing at the research, I am just saying that many different outcomes are possible. By the way if all of the Antarctic ice melted (something that would take hundreds or even thousands of years) sea levels would rise by hundreds of feet, Greenland has only about 7% of the ice mass and the rest of the northern arctic, and high mountains all told just 1%, so 92% of land ice is down there.
A fully melted down Antarctica would submerge just about all of Florida, Louisiana and coastal Texas, as one example, or just about all of the Netherlands, Belgium and coastal Germany, the UK would look like Ireland and most of Ireland would be submerged also.
This could happen eventually if this inter-glacial goes on long enough. The last one was shorter and the Antarctic ice is probably semi-permanent through the four glacial maxima that are known to have occurred in the “recent” geological past. Greenland ice may be almost as durable but there are doubts that it survived all three inter-glacials before this one. Going back, the second of the three inter-glacials was also a longer one.