5 ms·
A lot of it is in the glaciers of Antartica, which cover the whole continent with around 1900m of ice. They weren't created from seawater freezing, but from sno
by tlb 4y ago
A lot of it is in the glaciers of Antartica, which cover the whole continent with around 1900m of ice. They weren't created from seawater freezing, but from snow getting packed down. But the water will go into the ocean if they melt.
- oneoff786 4y agoAh ok that makes sense
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y agoThere isn't that much water on earth, this image does an amazing job of explaing the scale in the quickest way. It also sort of explains how easy it would be for earth's water to have come from asteroid impacts. https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/all-the-worlds-water.jpg https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
- oneoff786 4y agoI’m not saying it’s wrong, but this graphic is very difficult for me to understand. Is there any geographical significance to the location of the water blobs? No, right? But they also don’t include saltwater which is most of it. Right?
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y agoThe big bubble is all water, frozen, sea, etc. The small bubble is all fresh (rain clouds etc), rivers, lakes. The smaller is lakes and rivers only. Here's an article showing comparisons to various moon ice. https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-water-ice-volume-versus-planets-moons-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-water-ice-volume-versu...
- exitb 4y agoBy far most of the water is in the oceans, which have an average depth of 3688m. 2% of the water is currently frozen, so one can easily estimate how much would the sea level raise, had it all melt. EDIT: Corrected km to meters, as comment below points out.
- ditn 4y agoFor those reading this with incredulity I believe the above commenter made a typo - the average depth is 3688m, or 12,100ft.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoFor reference, there's ~6.4M cubic miles of water in antarctica - and ~321M cubic miles of water in the ocean.
- oneoff786 4y agoI think that’s difficult to utilize for comprehending sea level. The relationship between total volume and sea level won’t be linear.
- nicoburns 4y agoSurface area of the ocean would be more useful I think?
- JackC 4y agoIt's not the volume of the ocean that matters for sea level rise but the surface area, right? Ocean surface area is 140M square miles, so 6.4M cubic miles of water would naively be like a 241 foot rise -- each cubic mile gets split into 140/6.4 slices.
- OJFord 4y agoFine as a rough approximation of course, but don't forget surface area will grow as sea level rises and threatens land.
- tomrod 4y agoAdditionally the crust is elastic and will move around a bit (especially lifting) with the ice weight off. This is still occurring in many places that were glaciated previously.
- Fuhrer01 4y agoI'm a bit stupid, but I understand if we are dropping 6.4M cubic miles from space, there will be an increase in water level, but if the 6.4M cubic miles of water was already present in the system, just frozen, how does it increase the total sea level? There is no net change in volume right?