Why would ice caps melting cause sea levels to rise? Wouldn’t the water just be replacing what the caps were displacing?

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Why would ice caps melting cause sea levels to rise? Wouldn’t the water just be replacing what the caps were displacing?

In: Earth Science

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

First, a bunch of the world’s ice is on land, not on water, so it’s not just replacing ice water with liquid water, it’s actually adding more water to the ocean. Second, and this is not directly part of your question, but heat makes things expand, so increased global warming (which is what’s causing ice caps to melt) will cause all the water in the world’s oceans to expand which means sea level rise.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the ice we are worried about is ice that is on land.

That’s actually what an ice *cap* means as opposed to an ice*berg*

Ice thats currently on land melting into the ocean means there’s now more water in the ocean.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The caps are not being replaced because its too warm for the caps to be replaced and freeze

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not all of the ice-caps are floating on water. There’s glaciers over Greenland, northern Canada, Siberia, Norway, Antarctica, and several other landmasses. That ice getting dumped into the ocean will raise the sea level.

Edit: Rising sea-levels isn’t even the worst issue though. More cold, aerated water flowing through the ocean streams is a bad thing on its own as it disrupts the cycles that ocean-life has adapted to, causing problems itself. So even if sea-level rise wasn’t a problem we don’t want melting ice-caps.