It’s a couple of kilometres thick, 30km wide, moving at 3.5km per year, and it’s putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. Throughout the 1990s, according to satellite measurements, the glacier was accelerating by around 1% a year. Julian Scott’s sensational finding this season is that it now seems to have accelerated by 7% in a single season, sending more and more ice into the ocean.
If the Pine Island Glacier does continue to surge and discharge most of its ice into the sea, it could raise global sea level by 25cm.
If the entire region were to lose its ice, the sea would rise by 1.5m worldwide.
if ALL the wolrd’s ice melted, sea level would be approx 70 m higher.
When land ice melts, the distribution of the mass of water around the global ocean is not uniform. A large melting would result in a modification in the Earth’s gravity field, so the sea level change will be higher in some places than in others.
So.. anyway.. buy a house on a hill.
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