Have you seen the news today? On our BBC TV news, we are told that the ice caps are melting. That a THIRD has gone, and that scinetists are completely baffled Something similar happened more than 800, 000 years ago! What do you think will be the consequences of this for the world, us?
The original information: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Read the rest -> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4290340.stm
Most likely, it's just getting hotter. May_wentee Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sea levels will rise, coast lines will be altered, low lying land near coasts will disappear, real estate situated on beaches and nearby will be worth zilch and it will get WARMER, causing more freak weather! It doesn't look good.
Noah ark? please.. There's plenty of hard land above 100m Of course, coastal cities would suffer The richest ones will probably build walls and sand mountains around.
It has happened a lot of times before. Birds would get a bit confused for a couple of years and some hikers would get lost. I don't see though why you see this connected with the global warming. As far as I know it's an independent process.
Yes, it seems the polar ice is melting again. Is this "normal"? It happens. I found an interesting story from 2000. I do not know if this theory has been disproved. Snippets of article: "Hearty has come to the cliffs searching for a distinctive limestone band from 400,000 years ago, a warm interlude known as stage 11. For decades, coastal geologists such as Hearty have been finding scattered hints of greatly elevated sea levels during stage 11. For much of the past million years, Earth has shuddered through a series of ice ages, each lasting close to 100,000 years. Punctuating these chills are relatively brief interglacial periods like the current time. In the 1950s, when oceanographers first discovered signs of this glacial cycle recorded in deep-sea sediments, they named the various epochs going backward, starting with the present interglacial as stage 1. Four separate glacial periods separate modern times from the epoch known as stage 11. The presence of relatively modern algae indicates that much or all of West Antarctica must have melted sometime within the past million years, leaving open ocean in its place. Scientists base the comparison on features of Earth's orbit. Every 400,000 years, the shape of the orbit varies from a squashed circle to a more nearly perfect one. This shape alters the amount of summer sunlight hitting the Northern Hemisphere—the factor believed to push Earth into and out of ice ages. " Full article here: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000226/bob10.asp Now another instance of possible climate change is the sunspot cycle. There are links to increased sunspot activity causing heating on the earth, and the lack of sunspots causing cooling. There is still much debate. One article here: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sunspot_record_041027.html How can sunspots be linked to climate changes? Maybe because of the solar flares associated with them. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solar_flares_031103.html A solar flare results in temporary enhancement of radiation at wavelengths including x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, and radio. The brightest parts visible in the movie http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/flare.html probably reached a temperature of about 20 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius), while the visible surface of the Sun has a temperature of about 11,000 degrees F (6,000 degrees C). There have been a number of huge x-class solar flares over the last 5 years. Another article (and links) I was reading over pointed out some evidence of rapid changes in tempatures. A much harder read for sure: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm Now I am no expert on such things for sure. Thoughts?
About eighty metres of sea-level rise if all the ice melts--plus further sea-level rise because the Greenland and Antarctic continents will rise out of the sea, displacing more water.
Can you give us a date when this infamous event (the global sea-level rise) will have infact, taken place in total? It will be helpful to help me and others decide when to buy some sea-front property, especially in California. May_wentee Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
So i suppose this will mean then that Holland will diappear, so will Venice, Britain will bcome little islands....South Sea islands will all disappear, etc........ how much of all this is due to mankind's effect on Nature?
Quite little, the same has happened many times with no humans around. Earth is a dynamic geo- and ecosystem, it has no static state.