[flukus]

> The article was interesting in that it use the word "could". In context, the only ice that will contribute to sea level rises is land based. We could lose all the sea based ice and the overall effect most likely will be a drop in sea level.

These shelves are built from ice that has flowed from land to out over the ocean, the more it melts the more that flow increases and the more ice goes from being on land to being in the ocean.

> To get a 1 metre sea level rise, requires the melting of land based ice of a volume equivalent to the entire surface area of Australia covered to a depth of 45 metres or so. The energy requirements for phase conversion is at least 1 million 25 MegaTonne nuclear bombs going off,

There was a thunderf00t video very recently on this topic (sorry I can't link to it from work), I forget the exact figures that he came too but the energy effect of global warming was on the order of thousands of megatonne bombs a second.

[oldandtired]

My comment about the 1 million bombs is related to just the amount of energy required to convert solid water to liquid water at 0 degrees Celsius.

The figures that I have seen from various studies indicate that only a very small amount of the energy stored in water ever gets to actually meting ice.

In regards to the ice flows, the flow is caused by evaporated water from the oceans being deposited on the land at the glacier. Without that depositing of water vapour, there is no flow. Hence, until a determined study is made on the full dynamics of this cycle, mayhaps one should not be using this as the driving example or even as an example.