"Habitability of Antartica if poles melted?" Topic

Everyone talks about how so much land would be flooded if global warming were to go rampant.

Wouldn't the melting of Antartica and potential resources there be a trade off somehow?

No. Not really. Antarctica's a big continent, but it's not THAT big.

There's **A LOT** of water locked up. Really, huge scary amounts. There's a statistic that if all the water vapour in the air were added to the oceans it would raise them a couple of feet. Adding the antarctic ice would add HUNDREDS of feet to the oceans.

I live in Coventry, we're a hundred miles from the ocean. We are apparently only 98 feet above sea-level (or at least the airport is, which is where I found the data for).

So, I guess an AWFUL lot of the world will be under water…

IIRC Antarctica has 70% of the fresh water on earth.

Think about that.

If the caps melt we're all screwed. My little part of East Anglia here in England would be well under water. Expect a lot of fighting for the high ground!

TMP link

And Ghiya would finally be rid of this scourge, this vermin, this pest that has spread nothing but sorrow and death in a million-year infestation. Freeing the evolutionary stage for: The rise of the Penguins! Penguins rule! More likely, IMO, would be the switching of the poles. It has happened before, and there are signs of it starting again.

Antartica is big, (14 million square kilometres )about the size of the one and a half Canadas, but smaller then Russia. So if a country, antartica would be the secound largest. But how much do you like New York, Boston, LA, Seattle,… All these are way under the new sea level. Look at this map: picture
All the dark green is under the new sea level. It turns out people like to live near sea level and the slope of the land is often very slight. As a foot of ocean rise will result is hunderds of feet of water up the shore. Here:
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is Florida at 1,2, 4 and 8 meters.

While is might be nice to have a home with a six month day, that six month night would be a killer. Do not expect to grow any food, we know of now, there. There will be no soil for a few thousand years after the ice is gone. And no plants are adapted to the strange growing cycle. Also, if you like to breath, consider that all the big rain forests would be under the sea, they are the main source for the O2 in the air. I think it has to be thought of as a bad trade all the way around.

DyeHard
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Is there oil or precious metals or something else lucrative down there?

CC

"Is there oil or precious metals or something else lucrative down there?

CC"

No one knows!
It under too much ice now.

DyeHard
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I think the only thing that you'll find beneath all that ice will be everyones lost keys!

(They've got to go somewhere, like)

I read somewhere that with the great weight of the Antarctic ice cap, it's squiched a lot of the land underneath down below sea level. Might not be much land on hand at the south pole if the cap melted and the seas rose.

Now "k mcchutney", you are getting into some of the reasons why if the ice melts, we can expect a lot more earthquakes and volcano explosions and such. When you start changing the distribution of the mass on the Earth's crust you can expect all kinds of nastiness. So with the sea level up, imagine what a Tsunami would be like, how about a few each year?

DyeHard
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There's quite a lot of cool, valuable stuff to be found on the continent in the form of natural resources. Exploiting them might be expensive, but on the other hand, coal, uranium, oil and various other resources are presently mined/drilled in Alaska, Siberia and even Spitsbergen, so it's just a question of time until some country chooses to ignore the Madrid treaty.

That place even has it's own internet country code: .aq
Cool or what?!

k mcchutney, if that's true, then once the ice melts, the land will probably 'rebound'. That's what's happening in the UK: after the glaciers retreated, the land masses are rebounding; Scotland is rising up, and south England is sinking back again.

Actually, based on the latest things I've been reading about global warming, Europe is already screwed. There have been distressing signs that the Gulf Stream is shutting down.

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Of course, that's an effect of global warming that wasn't the main point of discussion.

If the polar ice caps go, we're looking at about 70 meters, or over 210' for the metric-impaired.

nsidc.org/sotc/sea_level.html

For a good recent book on the subject of global warming, glacier melting, and possible climatological consequences, try this one:

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On the other hand, if you prefer to believe that all this global warming stuff is hogwash cooked up by eco-terrorist hippies, you may prefer this one:

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;)

DyeHard: Atmospheric oxygen comes mostly from oceanic algae, not from rain forest plants. Think about it: Earth had an oxygen atmosphere before the rain forest existed. The rain forest provides a large carbon sink, but I doubt the world will have much trouble replacing lost forest. (Men, not oceans, destroy forests.)

I just got back from a vacation in the Florida Keys. Sea level has varied dramatically in just the last few thousand years. During the glacial age about 15,000 years ago, it was possible to walk from St. Petersburg to Key West directly across the Gulf of Mexico. Sea level was over 100 meters lower!

Of course, sea levels have also been much higher than they are now. The aquarium in Charleston, South Carolina has a nice exhibit showing much of the state was underwater 100,000 years ago. (Yeah, it was a *lovely* vacation for a Yankee from Michigan… ;)

People have this weird concept that change is bad, but what we think of as "the way it's always been" is really just a tiny snapshot of Earth's history. Man is probably accelerating change and that may be bad for biological systems to adapt, but change itself is inevitable. Oceans will go up. Of course, man also has the power to reverse this change and unnaturally cause the sea level to remain constant! Is it better to let sea levels rise and flood our cities or to alter the Earth and try to cool things down?

Supposedly…Antartica, had 'soil' and plants…and possibly even DINOSAURS…at one time…back when 'Pangea' or the supercontinant existed…several hundred million years back??? So there might be soil/coal/petroleum reserves…and a lot of other stuff…

BUT, how much of it would be 'underwater' if all the ice melted??? Also, if the SP melts, what about the NP and all the ice over the NORTHERN Hemisphere…??

And then again…what about GREENLAND…isn't most of the 'continent' only habitable around the edges…and the interior of the place under an ice shield 4 miles THICK???

It seems to me, that IF there were any resources worth exposing under ice…we should check out GREENLAND first???

I mean, a lot of scifi campaigns/stories and even HP Lovecraft himself..had 'stuff' going on in Antartica…but what about GREENLAND???

And if the gulf stream did 'divert/shut-down'…what would happen to the east coast of the US, Canada, UK, even ICELAND??? (it isn't just the volcanic activity that keeps it 'habitable'???

Speaking of Greenland…I don't recall ever reading much about it…in real life or 'fiction'…other than those WWII airplanes under 250 feet of ice that 'soft-crashed' decades ago and they were trying to recover??? Would it be a feasible 'scenario' for adventures in GREENLAND for pulp or scifi/horror or has someone already done that???

Unless it's all under water of course!

Lt DWW

Dont worry,Michael Crichton has the answer to all these questions and more.

I'm 229 meters above sea level, so I'll probably be OK until the food runs out (and it gets cold…)

-Alex

Then we will finally get to see what is in those lakes:
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And there is going to be a stampede of paleontologists to the de-iced continent:
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CC

If all the ice melted, I wonder what the temperatures would be like in Artartica. Would it be habitable, I wonder.

What would be the effect on sea life if all that fresh water dumps in?… even a small percentage change in salinity could really throw a wrench into the ecology…

venusboys3 – the ice caps at the poles are the pumping mechanism for getting oxygen to the bottom of the sea (all that cold, oxygen rich, salty water sinks). If they go the immediate ecological consequence is that everything in the deep oceans dies.

Of course, things that like living in shallow oceans will have lots of fun colonising new homes – like Coventry Airport that KatieL mentioned.

Arturo – you might gain some oil and coalfields in Antarctica, but a lot of the existing ones suddenly turn from shallow water drilling to deep water drilling if sea level goes up, which (probably) makes them more expensive and difficult to extract.

"If all the ice melted, I wonder what the temperatures would be like in Artartica. Would it be habitable, I wonder."

It is still at a pole, and that won't change any time soon. If the climate and weather patterns shift to make the poles deserts (in terms of rainfall) and become warm enough to melt off what ice is there, I would still expect we'd see no warmer than permafrost conditions. Much warmer and humanity will be too busy fighting over the high ground to see if Antarctica is a tourist spot. It may also suffer "short" term in that the land of Antarctica and Greenland won't necessarily rebound fast enough to stay above water.

I knew I had seen these online some place:

The world after the ice melts:
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and
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"Today the Earth has 148 million sq. km of land area, of which 16 million sq. km is covered by glaciers. A sea level rise of 66 meters would flood about 13 million sq. km of land outside Antarctica. Without polar ice, Antarctica and Greenland would be ice free, although about half of Antarctica would be under water. Thus, ice-free land would be 128 million sq. km compared to 132 million sq. km today."
Or a net loss of only 4 million square km. much less then I would have thought. (that would just be like loosing Sweden or Spain)(or for those in the States, the size of California or for those on the east cost of Maryland, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Alabama and Florida combined). Of course we are gaining a lot in Greenland and Antarctica, so even more of the inhabited land of today will be lost. In fact, it looks like Greenland and the parts of Antarctica still above water are about 9 million sq. km so the total loss of present day inhabited shore would be 13 million sq. km or the size of the USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands and a New Zealand (or two) all combined.

Now doesn't that sound like fun!

DyeHard
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I still don't ge why the Baja Californian peninsula would stay as dry land—according to the mapped simulations—but hey! this idea is just too creepy.

Mexico City would stay very dry, thank you, but it would be freezing in here. And just now it's REALLY COLD!! Atypically cold for the past half decade.

Maaan, I don't want the ice caps gone, really!!!

Cool mining possibilities!

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CC

I'm thinking Antartica still wouldn't be especially habitable even if all the ice melted off somehow. Much of the continent (all the continents, actually) would be under water at that point, and as for the rest of it, who really wants to have a shoggoth as a neighbor?

Area, according to the Factbook:

14 million sq km
14 million sq km (280,000 sq km ice-free, 13.72 million sq km ice-covered) (est.)

note: fifth-largest continent, following Asia, Africa, North America, and South America, but larger than Australia and the subcontinent of Europe

Area – comparative:
slightly less than 1.5 times the size of the US

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As for most of Antarctica being under water after the pole melt, was it under water before it shifted to the current position?

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And, would it "lift" up once the weight of the ice was no longer there, like some other parts of North America and Europe did after the end of the last ice age?

CC

Even if the sea level rose a couple of hundred feet, I think that most of the continent would stay way above sea level:

picture
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Is my assumption correct?

CC

Check out this other map of a melted Antarctica:

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CC

Is that melted ice caps earth map correct? It seems questionable – some of SE Asia is still there?

Granted, there are highpoints amongst Indonesia & Phillipines, but wouldn't the majority of those island chains be underwater?

A more realistic perspective here:

TMP link

CC

If anyone wants a more current science-based discussion on the future development of Antactica:

TMP link

CC

CC, with the treaty making developing illegal in Antarctica, does that mean that the under-ice Predator hunting zoo is in violation?

LOL

Treaties were meant to be broken!

CC

It was green once. With appropriate global warming, it shall be again!!!!!

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C'mon guys. I know we can do it!

CC

I keep seeing revised figures about how fast the ice will melt. I think we're down to "the entirety of the ice sheet will be melted two weeks from next Sunday."

.."Treaties are made to be broken"…

Heck ya! I've been calling for nuke bases on the moon and in space for twenty plus years!!!!

And, a permanent underwater silo in Lake Okeechobee! (we need more nukes in Florida). I don't think we even have an MX here :(

"If all the ice melted, I wonder what the temperatures would be like in Artartica. Would it be habitable, I wonder."

If the polar ice melted you should worry what the temperature in the rest of the planet would be.

"Area, according to the Factbook:

14 million sq km
14 million sq km (280,000 sq km ice-free, 13.72 million sq km ice-covered) (est.)

note: fifth-largest continent, following Asia, Africa, North America, and South America, but larger than Australia and the subcontinent of Europe

Area – comparative:
slightly less than 1.5 times the size of the US"

Yes, but that is a measurement of the surface area of the ice shelf and not Antarticas land mass. There is a bluish picture half way down Wikipedia showing the actual land as it is now. Of course if the ice melts then the oceans would increase their current levels and the land would rebound. Therefore it is pretty difficult to guess how big and what the shape of Antarctica would be.

Ralph

This is all very interesting in an academic way. Global warming is a reality, all I have to do is compare the average temperatures now to the average temperatures from when I was a kid and I can see the trend. Are humans the cause of it… no, I don't think so. We definitely contribute to it to be sure. We could be much smarter with the way we treat our environment. On a geological time scale, we won't even be a blip in the history of the planet. And whatever we do to it, ultimately… it will recover like we had never existed. The Bikini Atoll was destroyed by a hydrogen bomb about 50 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. We did the worst we could do at Bikini and it is recovering in just the span of my life-time. There is plant life there again and animals have taken up resisdence there again. The planet will recover. Species become exticnt all of the time and we never hear about it. It is a natural process. That doesn't mean we should be stupid with our enviroment though.

This is interesting . . .

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CC

"Giant marine life found in Antarctica"

Can't think of a better headline:

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CC

Easy:

"Foot of Elder Things Found, American Submarine Sent to Nuke R'lyeh."

Um, wouldn't that actually *help* the Elder things? After all, they did fight a war against Cthulu.