OK, I’ve always had trouble with this idea. As far as I’ve ever known, when you drop ice in a glass of water, the ice already displaces an amount of water equal to the amount of water in the ice. So as it melts, it won’t cause the water to suddenly overfull the glass. So what’s different about the polar ice that makes it so that it will raise the sea level if it’s already floating in the sea to begin with?
In: Planetary Science
About the melting polar caps and the rising sea. I happen to own a globe, which is like a map of the world painted on a football. Both polar caps are painted white because of ice and snow. I can see that these two white patches, together with any smaller ones scattered across the continents, would need to be stacked darn tall for the ocean to rise much when they melt. So no luck with wiping out kitschy beachfront resorts, though it might meddle with the planet’s sunlight reflection quotient because less white means less reflected light. So maybe that’ll prove to be the tricky part
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