Antarctica Ice Melting Calculations?

Sounds like the math doesn't work for Al Gore. Consider also that ice shrinks as it melts. The opposite of what water does when it freezes.

i didn't look at your numbers, but the real calculation (based on estimates of antarctic ice) should be about 60 meters. I've done the calcs, it's roughly 80 meters of sea level rise if all of greenland and antarctic ice melts.

After looking, I don't get the mixing of meters and kilometers conversion with oceans. 361,000 km^3 of ice (ignoring density difference-not 361 million km^3 as you have said, assuming you meant cubic not square km) will raise the ocean 1 meter. That's only about 25 meters of ice thickness on average in antarctica. multiply by 60 (raise ocean 60 meters) and you have an average thickness of 1.5 km for the ice covering antarctica, which is probably pretty close to reality, so I am not sure what your argument really is.

Um, you made an error. By your numbers, Antarctic ice covers 1/26 of the Earth. So even 30m or so of Antarctic Ice melting would raise the oceans by about a metre.

The EAIS is pretty stable, it's the WAIS that is the problem. And melting is only part of the problem, it's much more complicated than that. The WAIS is only partially supported by land, it's a "fossil" remnant of the last ice age. And it's showing worse signs all the time:

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7010131277

The ice sheets of Antarctica -- the world's largest reservoir of fresh water -- are shrinking faster than new snow can fall, scientists reported Thursday in the first comprehensive satellite survey of the continent.

Researchers at the University of Colorado determined that between 2002 and 2005, Antarctica lost its ice at a rate of 36 cubic miles a year, rather than growing from heavier snowfalls as previous research had predicted. That amount of ice is equivalent to about 30 times the fresh water used by Los Angeles every year.

"It is the first time we can say that if you look at the entire ice sheet, it is losing mass," said geophysicist Isabella Velicogna, whose findings were published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Earlier this month, an independent research team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena reported that the Arctic glaciers of Greenland were melting twice as fast as five years ago, adding an extra 38 cubic miles of fresh water to the Atlantic Ocean every year.

Taken together, the findings suggest that a century of steady increases in global temperatures has altered the seasonal balance of the world's water cycle.

If so, experts say, increasing global temperatures -- the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990 -- might be hastening the demise of the polar ice caps, and estimates of the pace of future sea-level rise could be too low.

By previous calculations, Antarctica's coastal glaciers shed enough meltwater every year to raise world sea levels by two-tenths of an inch, even as new snow falling in the interior locked up the same amount in the ice cap. The result was that sea level remained essentially the same from year to year.

The newest work signals a broader loss across the continent -- an amount equal to more than 13 percent of the annual sea-level rise measured in recent years, the researchers said. The shrinkage is concentrated in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough fresh water to raise global sea levels more than 20 feet.

The researchers based their findings on unique gravity measurements collected by a pair of orbiting satellites, called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, launched in 2002.

Eric Rignot at JPL called the gravity measurement technique "a breakthrough" because the satellites allow researchers for the first time to measure changes across immense swaths of Earth's surface