Quote:
|
Originally Posted by samcol
If the north pole melts won't the world sea levels remain constant or actually drop? Ice shrinks when it changes into water. If you have a glass of water with ice cubs heaped over the rim, it never floods over. Of course there's probably some key fact that I'm missing?
|
The polar ice cap isn't the issue in and of itself, although there are problems when it melts (no big cap of white ice to reflect energy back into space). The real problem up that way is the Greenland ice sheet, which _is_ mainly on land, and currently is melting faster than snow is accumulating on top of it.
The worry is that at some point the internal structure of the ice sheet will have become weakened enough by warmer temps, and well-lubricated enough by melt water, for extremely large hunks of the ice sheet to get into the ocean pretty quickly. If all the ice in Greenland went into the sea, global sea level would rise ~30 feet. If even just a third of that went into the sea, we'd have a _lot_ of coastal inundation and millions of refugees.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ASU2003
Maybe we should have NASA put a huge (HUGE (1000 mile diameter) solar panel array in orbit so it is always between the Sun and the Earth. It will track along the equator as the Earth spins, but also take 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. I think they are called lagrange points. It will block out some of the Sun's energy from reaching the Earth, but also provide power.
|
There's a somewhat easier, if also more dire and perhaps more uncontrollable solution: shoot a whole bunch of atomic sulphur up into orbit; let it spread out into a big cloud. Sulphur is white, and it reflects sunlight _really well._ If we could get enough sulphur up there, we could block a lot of the sun's energy. The question is, what happens if we put _too much_ up there? And how do you get rid of it when you don't want it anymore?