From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s328940@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jul 27 2002 - 04:01:49 MDT
On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 01:48, Kevin Bluck wrote:
>
> >Scientists seem to agree on at least one aspect of global warming: any sea
> >level change will be gradual.
>
> I can think of at least one scenario in which sea level change would be
> abrupt and catastrophic. If a large portion of the Ross ice shelf should
> detach and slide into the ocean, sea levels could rise almost overnight as
> much as 2 meters. Once the shelf was gone, sloughing of the West Antarctic
> ice sheet would likely accelerate greatly without Ross to help hold it
> back, producing further sea rises measured in meters over a relatively
> short timescale measured in decades or less. Happily, the much larger East
> ice sheet seems to be much more firmly anchored, but Ross is a definite
> "weakest link" for the West sheet.
The following site thinks the numbers are slightly different:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/factsheet/fs133-99/gl_vol.html
It claims the maximum sea level rise potential if the Ross Ice Shelf
were to completely melt would be 1 cm.
alejandro
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