On Mar 19, 10:50*am, "HeyBub" wrote:
PD wrote:
You've gotten some good answers. I asked a while back why a glass
filled with ice and water added doesn't overflow when the ice melts
if you don't drink any of the water I can't for the life of me
remember the answer and am too lazy to Google for it. It just seemed
a curious thing to me.

And the answer is that because ice is less dense than water, the
volume of the ice when it melts (into water) becomes exactly equal to
the volume under the waterline of the icecubes. This is in fact the
discovery that Archimedes made a few years back.

Which is also why, if the entire Artic ice shelf melts, the ocean level will
rise exactly zero feet.

This is not true of the Antarctic ice fields - they've got southern ice.

If the Arctic ice melts, however, the salinity of the oceans will change and
all the fish will DIE. Bathers will no longer have to worry about sharks,
true, but Pirana will be able to live in the ocean...

This is also true. Unfortunately, if the Arctic ice fields melt, then
so do the Antarctic ice fields, though there may be some short-term
(~10 year) anisotropy. And there is far more ice in the Antarctic than
in the Arctic -- about 8 times as much.

PD