Place a lot of ice cubes in a bowl (large salad bowl), then fill with water until the ice floats.
When the water over flows the bowl, that's when you can panic, It won't happen though. It's called Displacement. The ice floating in the water already has taken the space of the melt water that will replace the area the ice has taken up. Water level will not increase.
Thank you. I was just going to post the same thing - you saved me the trouble.
I swear, people must just love to have something to panic about.
Actually, it will increase, these are ANTARCTIC Glaciers, which means they are on LAND. They are not currently displacing the oceans.
Having said that, I dont know why anybody expected the earth to remain constant, it is always undergoing change..
Having said that, there is no reason to assume that melting glaciers would have no impact on sea level. When the glacier is frozen, the water isn't in the sea -- so when it melts, the water flows down and increases the volume of the body of water underneath it.
Actually, to make the experiment more analogous to earth, you would need to place some rocks in the salad bowl with the tops of the rocks protruding above the top of the water, and then put some of the ice on top of those rocks and not just in the water. That way, when the ice on top of the rocks melts, the salad bowl will over-flow.
"Try this experiment...
Place a lot of ice cubes in a bowl (large salad bowl), then fill with water until the ice floats.
When the water over flows the bowl, that's when you can panic, It won't happen though. It's called Displacement. The ice floating in the water already has taken the space of the melt water that will replace the area the ice has taken up. Water level will not increase."
Which is true in the Arctic where all of the ice floats on water. A few months ago the global warming weenies said North Pole ice floes were melting and the world was doomed. Ten year old kids knew they were wrong.
So they moved their fallacious argument to the South Pole where about 70% of the ice is above sea level. It still ain't gonna happen, but the logic isn't so fatally flawed as with their last fairy tale.
Some of the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are coming off land rather than forming in water.
Yes, but that doesn't work for Antartica because the ice there is allready sitting on mountain tops.
P.S. But you are correct, floating ice will not raise the level of the water. If anything, it will decrease because water takes up more volume when it is frozen.