You, too, can be a big time climate change scientist.
Here’s a simple experiment you can do to simulate a melting glacier:
Fill a clear drinking glass 1/2 full with water. Add several pinches of salt and stir until salt is dissolved. This becomes the “ocean” in which the experiment will be conducted.
Put an ice cube (glacier) in the ocean.
Carefully mark the level of the ocean in the glass. This gives you the ocean depth.
Allow the glacier to melt in the ocean.
Check the mark on the drinking glass. Any increase or decrease in the ocean depth?
Smugly tell your family and friends how you proved the scientists are full of BS.
Your proposed experiment is valid for floating ice, i.e. an iceberg.
Try it again with the ice cube suspended above the water in the glass. Like ice on a land mass above sea level.
Just sayin’...
Your point would be valid in the arctic where the ice is frozen seawater that is free floating in denser water and is displacing it, but this is a glacier which means most of it is on land- in other words, it’s made of ice that formed from precipitation and not from seawater, and it is coming down a mountainside, meaning it is additional fresh water, not merely displaced seawater. The seawater is eroding the ice at the point where glacier meets sea.
You can simulate a melting glacier by putting a block of ice on your kitchen counter. Melt it from the bottom edge where it hangs over the counter with a hair dryer. As you melt it keep pushing it towards the edge and the hair dryer’s flow. You will end up with a puddle of water on the floor that wasn’t there before. You will also notice that as it melts it slides easier, because water gets beneath the block and “lubricates” it.
Because the melting of this glacier is from the bottom up and not the top down, the ice bearing land just onshore may be warmer too, effectively “lubricating” the glacier’s path and lowering the friction in the same way. But this effect will only be on that narrow part right on shore, so I doubt it can measurably speed up the total glacier’s descent.
What they are not telling you is how long the process will go on, and they’re not saying that the warm currents can only affect a portion of the glacier that is at sea and maybe a wee bit onshore, but not the bulk of what lies on land- so even if the melting of that portion at sea were to happen all at once and not over thousands of years, the rest is still going to be on land, quite unaffected...
That is, unless whatever is causing the warm current is geothermal and also heating up the land. A lot of things can cause warm currents to form, though. If we don’t know why currents have changed then we also don’t know when or if they will change again, or if the currents have done it in the past.... for all anyone knows the warm current may be a recurring one that has appeared and disappeared for tens of thousands of years.
Aren’t they talking about ice on top of land?
Put an ice cube (glacier) in the ocean.
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The ice cube represents an iceberg, not a glacier which is on land and which would add water to the ocean.
You are supposed to measure the water level after you add the ice cube.