|Mother Nature Cleaning Up The Mess|
Regular readers know that I have posted about the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice recently (e.g. Databases Galore - 16, Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 58).
Thus, they would also
|Mother Nature Cleaning Up The Mess|
Regular readers know that I have posted about the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice recently (e.g. Databases Galore - 16, Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 58).
Thus, they would also probably expect that the published peer-reviewed paper with the title "The melting of floating ice raises the ocean level" would catch my eye.
It is probably because I like to search out common myths in science, both ancient and modern, and remind myself and others that we are not immune from being utterly devoid of understanding an issue at any point in time (What Is Pseudo Science?).
II. Yet Another Common Scientific Myth
The part of the paper that hooked me up was this statement:
The melting of floating ice in a global warming will cause the ocean to rise.(SLC Due To Melting of Sea Ice, PDF version). They go on to point out that the common lore is myth, then they calculate the amounts involved.
Common lore (Warrick et al. 1996; Church et al. 2001; Miller & Douglas 2004; Oppenheimer 2004; Spokes 2004; Wadhams & Munk 2004; Williams 2004; Weart 2005; Kolbert 2005) holds that, due to Archimedes’ Principle (Archimedes, ca. 220BC), the melting of floating ice will not change the global mean sea level. The melting of ice was heretofore believed to raise the sea level only when the ice is supported by land (‘grounded ice’). This supposition is implicit in analyses of sea level rise that omit floating ice from the fluid budget (Meier & Wahr 2002) and explicit in Munk (2003), as well as Antonov et al. (2002), who directly state that the melting of floating ice is to be excluded in calculating sea level rise.
But, this change is a minor player in the overall dynamics of sea level change (SLC).
I have written the same thing about melting Arctic sea ice (The AnthropoScenic Garbage-Gyre Level Rises).
Anyway, this interesting paper we are considering did not mention the relocation in any meaningful context, nor did the refer to Woodward 1888 or Mitrovica 1998, 2001, 2011 etc. concerning ice sheet gravity dynamics.
III. 2017 Collector's Report
I also ran across a report that may become a collector's