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
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.*
Latest Answers