BBC: Esa's Cryosat mission sees Antarctic ice losses double

[petros]

Living in a retirement home doesn't count.

I'm only semiretired at 46. I hope you get to be so lucky. Work hard son.

 

[MHz]

Not being real good at math but being somewhat logical I have to question the numbers. Since the bulk of an iceberg is already submerged and the weight of the rest is also displacing water should it not follow that melting glaciers will have zero or close to influence on seal level? From the calculations I have seen no one seems to be taking this into account while anyone that knows about boats does automatically.

I think the theory is that the ice forms on land and then hits the oceans. If you put a punch of icecubes in a tub with water in it the level will be higher when the ice goes in. That being said the Oceanic crust has about 60,000 km (http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/williams/Tectonics/Wilson Chapter.pdf) of spreading rifts that is several miles deep in a lot of locations. If that spreading is measured at a rate of and 2cm/year how much water is that that would be needed and no rise in oceanic levels would happen, if the same amount of land is not subducted at the same depth the levels in the ocean should be dropping and to rise the amount of ice would first have to fill up that new area. That could be 3,600,000 cubic km of new space in the oceans that would need that much water to stop from dropping. The Atlantic would seem to show that spreading is greater than 'subduction'.

Living in a retirement home doesn't count.

That isn't called living, it is called waiting to die.

 

[Cliffy]

Unprecedented B.C. glacier melt seeps into U.S. climate change concerns

The mountains of British Columbia cradle glaciers that have scored the landscape over millennia, shaping the rugged West Coast since long before it was the West Coast.
But they're in rapid retreat, and an American state-of-the-union report on climate change has singled out the rapid melt in British Columbia and Alaska as a major climate change issue.

Unprecedented B.C. glacier melt seeps into U.S. climate change concerns - British Columbia - CBC News