OFF: FLOODS ARE COMING

[Jill Strobridge]

Yeah - basically the floating ice shelves in the sea round about
Antarctica hold a large amount of the Antarctic land ice mass in
place.   Melt the sea ice and the land ice will start to slip -
quite dramatically probably.    There is work going on in Antarctica
at the moment to try and determine at what times and to what extent
the continent has been ice free and I was watching a tv programme
recently where it said it does seem that there was a period when the
ice did slide off a section of Antarctica and they were pointing to
scouring on cliffs in Chile several miles high.     However we are
talking about some hundreds of thousands of years ago here and I'm
not sure if the theory has ever been independently verified
elsewhere.     Apart from the recent Alaskan one the most dramatic
recent-ish landslip tsunami known about dates to a massive slide in
Norway about 7,000 years ago.    Since this puts it into the
Mesolithic period of habitation in Scotland archaeologists are
paying close attention to shell midden and other habitation sites
around the North Sea coastline to collect evidence of its effect
since the comparatively shallow waters would have caused quite a
dramatic surge.    .

jill
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Jill Strobridge <jill at theta-orionis.freeserve.co.uk>
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----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Warburton <desdinova at MADASAFISH.COM>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.SPC.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: OFF: FLOODS ARE COMING


> Even worse, the soap dish is at an angle, so when the underside
melts, the
> ice slips off when melting reaches a critical point.  This is the
situation
> with one of the Antarctic ice sheets. So figure out the size of
the
> tsunamis if that big mother goes!!!!
> ChrisW
>
> >Robert C. Mayo writes:
> >
> > > and even if it were true that the ice caps will melt, etc, why
would that
> > > cause flooding, necessarily? when the ice in a glass of
icewater melts,the
> > > glass doesn't overflow; the 'new' water takes up (nearly) the
same space as
> > > the ice that it used to be...did.
> >
> >Good analysis but I have Bad News: while the arctic ice is sea
ice, most
> >of the antarctic ice is on a shelf, as are the mountain glaciers.
What
> >happens if you have a full glass with ice on a soap dish above
it, and
> >then you melt the ice?
> >
> >FoFP
>