Seems like it could be a solution to them melting and raising the sea levels. I know it wouldn’t be simple but could we chip away at them over time?
In: 0
Ice that is already in the water isn’t the big issue with rising sea levels. It is the glaciers that are on land like Greenland, Alaska, Antarctica. They add water to the sea, whereas icebergs are already in the sea.
[removed]
1. Any ice that is already floating (aka all the icebergs) will not raise the ocean level at all if they melt. Try it yourself with ice cubes in a glass. If the ice is floating, then its weight has *already* raised the water level, so nothing changes when it melts. The ice that’s currently sitting on dry land above sea level (eg Antarctica, Greenland) is what’s going to raise the ocean level.
2. When we “use water for something”, the physical water is not actually consumed in the process. It still exists. So even if we somehow took all the glaciers off of Greenland, brought them to the US, and melted them here instead, *that would be the exact same thing* as them melting in Greenland. No matter what you “use the water for”, it’s still going to enter the world’s water cycle and therefore end up in the ocean.
For example, look at where water actually goes when you use it for watering crops:
* Some goes into the ground, where it will go to rivers and then the ocean
* Some will evaporate, so it will fall as rain somewhere and eventually drain into the ocean,
* Some will go into the crops themselves, but even that goes to the ocean – the crops get eaten and then all its water content is eventually breathed out (will will eventually fall as rain; see above) or peed out (ending up in rivers after treatment; see above).
3. Plus we’re talking about continent-size amounts of water. [Here’s just Greenland](https://guidetogreenland.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-true-size-of-Greenland-should-it-be-a-Continent-Guide-to-Greenland4-1.jpeg.webp), and it’s covered in hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of feet of ice. There’s nothing we could use that much water for, and even if we could, it would end up in the ocean. The only way to divert that would be to melt it but keep it in storage somehow…but you’d need storage tanks / reservoirs the size of Greenland to hold it all. So now a huge land area is under water but via storage tanks or reservoirs, so that doesn’t really accomplish anything.
We already have all the water nicely stored, on land, in a convenient solid form that doesn’t need containment and isn’t in anyone’s way because it’s in Greenland. You really can’t do better than this. Even if you could bring all the glaciers somewhere and melt them *for free and with zero energy required, you’d STILL be worse off.*
yes, if you pluck an iceberg out of the ocean it would technically lower sea level. but…
Considering the water cycle there isn’t really anywhere for it to go so that it doesn’t just end up in the ocean again. maybe hypothetically you could transport it inland antarctic or something where it is locked up as ice for a long time, but that’s so difficult you can call it impossible. With current technology there is no way to move an iceberg somewhere without contributing to greenhouse gasses, making the real core of the problem worse. I do not know how much energy would be needed to move a big iceberg to inland antarctic, it’s hard to calculate how much energy would be needed to do something that is effectively impossible at the moment.
Consider that sea level is rising .13 inches per year. that’s the equivalent of 15,700 big icebergs. With what humans know now, with our current technology and infrastructure, we couldn’t do it even once, and we would have to do that hundreds of times every day to make a difference.
here’s what i asked chatGPT:
question: how many icebergs would need to be removed from the ocean in a year to lower sea level by the amount sea level would rise in that year?
answer:
“According to the National Geographic, average sea levels have swelled over 8 inches (about 23 cm) since 1880, with about three of those inches gained in the last 25 years. Every year, the sea rises another .13 inches (3.2 mm.) Research published in February 2022 shows that sea level rise is accelerating and projected to rise by a foot by 2050. That translates into as much sea level rise in the next 30 years as occurred over the last century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The ocean has an area of about 361 million km². To decrease the sea level by 0.13 inches (3.302 mm), you would have to remove approximately 1.19 x 10¹² m³ of water from the ocean. A good-sized iceberg might measure 3,000 x 1,500 x 600 feet and contain somewhere around 20 billion gallons of fresh water. That’s equivalent to about 75.7 million m³ of water. So, to decrease the sea level by 0.13 inches, you would need to remove approximately 15,700 large icebergs from the ocean every year.”
People used to do this in the 1800s to some extent. Transport the ice from icebergs to be used elsewhere. It wasn’t the most feasible idea then, and it still isn’t now. Though maybe once things get bad enough that “for profit” ventures start becoming a thing of the past and become “For necessity” that might change. But even then, towing an iceberg is no easy feat, and transporting a moderate volume of water vast distances like that just isn’t very viable. An iceberg measuring 3,000 x 1,500 x 600 feet will have enough water to supply Florida for a single day. IF you could process it. IF you could distribute it around. And that’s a big ass berg
That would basically be like the oil industry, but with water
>Why can’t we break up icebergs,
Doable, but there are plenty of icebergs of every size. Just pick the one you want.
>Why can’t we transport them to land,
Mostly the cost. We could have a bunker oil cargo ship lash some ropes to it and drag it to wherever. Instead of hauling 320,000 tons of goods, it can pull this icecube instead. But hauling goods to locations helps sell goods, how valuable is the water?
But let’s say we just nudge it into a handy ocean current and it happens to end up on the beach of a drought-stricken land.
>(Why can’t we haul them onto land)
As in, up out of the water? In one whole piece, that’s absolutely insane. It’s 320,000 tons! But we could essentially set up a mining operation to carve out conveniently sized ice-cubes we could haul out on trucks and stuff. But that ain’t cheap.
>Why can’t we use the water for something else?
Total cost of the operation. It’s considered SUPER expensive to have trucks haul water anywhere. Of course, trucks haul sorts of stuff. The problem with water is we use a lot and expect it to be super cheap. As in free. With rivers of the stuff flowing by all the time. Consider the ol’ Miss. That’s 89,869 gallons per second. That’s 320,000 tons every 14 minutes. Or the San Joaquin River flowing past San Fran, with 320,000 tons of water every 41 minutes. And California collectively uses 70,638 tons of water for agriculture every minute.
We use so much of it, the amount of water a ship could haul just isn’t enough to be all that useful and unless several of those steps somehow become magically free, even desalination is a cheaper water source.
>Seems like it could be a solution to them melting and raising the sea levels.
Oh, hah. Even if we do all this and use iceberg cubes in cities and crop-land, it all still goes down the drain or evaporates and the water enters the water system down in the warm south and leaves the cold frozen north. It’ll still end up in the ocean one eventually.
Latest Answers