Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Environmental Science. Green Science. Photo courtesy NOAA. Cite This! Print Citation. Try Our Crossword Puzzle! What Is the Missing Number? Try Our Sudoku Puzzles! A memory. Reclaimed by the Adriatic Sea. Thousands of years from now, in this catastrophic scenario, the Netherlands will have long since surrendered to the sea, and most of Denmark will be gone too.
Meanwhile, the Mediterranean's expanding waters will also have swelled the Black and Caspian Seas. Land now inhabited by million Chinese would flood, as would all of Bangladesh, population million, and much of coastal India. Predominantly desert, the continent would gain a new inland sea—but it would lose much of the narrow coastal strip where four out of five Australians now live.
East Antarctica: The East Antarctica ice sheet is so large—it contains four-fifths of all the ice on Earth—that it might seem unmeltable. It survived earlier warm periods intact. Lately it seems to be thickening slightly—because of global warming. The warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which falls as snow on East Antarctica.
But even this behemoth is unlikely to survive a return to an Eocene Climate. West Antarctica: Like the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic one was apparently much smaller during earlier warm periods. It's vulnerable because most of it sits on bedrock that's below sea level.
The warming ocean is melting the floating ice sheet itself from below, causing it to collapse. Since it has averaged a net loss of 65 million metric tons of ice a year.
All rights reserved. This story appears in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. Share Tweet Email.
They dumped a lot of nasty chemicals and radioactive material in this region and they left the base — it's under the ice, but as the ice is melting. It is going to be exposed, and we don't know what's going to happen. It may actually change how long a day is. The ice sheets are close to the axis of rotation of the Earth — they are around the poles.
You melt this ice, and where this water will go is around the Earth, so further away from the axis of rotation. So the Earth is going to spin at a slower rate. Inverse asked a series of experts about five different scenarios for our planet by Read the rest: a supervolcano explodes , an asteroid impact , a pandemic wipes out 10 percent of humanity , and humans stop global warming. Future Earth What would happen if the polar ice caps melted?
Maddie Bender. Related Tags Climate Crisis.
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