The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #98401   Message #1950230
Posted By: John Hardly
28-Jan-07 - 06:48 AM
Thread Name: BS: 'An Inconvenient Truth'-banned
Subject: RE: BS: 'An Inconvenient Truth'-banned
I still don't see how the "Greenland Icesheet" numbers add up. The numbers are all available. I don't see how you can take the mass of ice covering 1/129th of the area of the oceans, and even if I granted you that the whole thing was 328 feet thick (instead of 328 feet thick at its thickest point) -- the most one could hope for in raising sea level would be 2.54 feet. (And before someone says "but 2.54 feet would be catastrophic in and of itself!" -- remember that the ice ISN'T 328 feet thick).

Greenland boasts the Northern Hemisphere's largest ice sheet—694, 981 square miles (1.8 million square kilometers)—which covers 85 percent of its total area • Humboldt, its largest glacier, is 62 miles (100 kilometers) wide and 164 to 328 feet (50 to 100 meters) thick.

The Atlantic covers an area of 82 million square kilometers (32 million square miles).
Arctic Ocean, the earth's northernmost cap. With an area of 12 million square kilometers (5 million square miles),
Indian Ocean covers an area of about 73 million square kilometers (about 28 million square miles)
the Pacific Ocean covers more than 166 million square kilometers (more than 64 million square miles)—about one-third of the earth's surface.

So the Greenland icesheet is 694, 981 square miles (.69 million sq mi)

The oceans that it is going to completely melt into are collectively approximately 129 million square miles.

That's approximately 129 times bigger than the Greenland icesheet.

And yet, somehow that 1/129 surface area is going to raise sea level 22 feet?