Galaxy Magazine (February 1955) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1955-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

would be tied up by increasing the glaciers on mountains, increasing the size of inland lakes, raising the water table everywhere, etc., etc., and that I would not expect a rise of the sea level of more than about six meters or 20 feet.

Somewhat to my surprise, this little item was noticed by a large number of people who mentioned it, mostly in personal conversations, for several months after it had appeared. Most of them expressed astonishment that the figure was so small, a few were as pleased with it as if it had been an immediate danger, while several told me bluntly that I had been too conservative in my answer.

One man distinctly remembered having read somewhere that if all the ice on Earth were melted, the sea level would rise by 6,000 feet. Since I recognized this figure, I could write him that he remembered only a part of what he had read. What this estimate—a fairly old one—really said was that it the Earth were smoothed out, shoveling all the continents into the oceans, as it were, and if all the ice were melted in the process, our planet would be covered with water 6,000 feet deep. Whether this estimate is correct is a different question, which I did not take the time to check.

A NOTHER correspondent

■*"*■ questioned my statement that much of the water would be tied up again in glaciers. He argued that if the climate grew warm enough to melt the polar caps, it would also be too warm to permit the formation of mountain glaciers, that those glaciers we now have would melt, too. This, of course, is correct, but as I recall the original letter, an artificial melting of the polar caps had been in the correspondent's mind, not a subtropical Earth from pole to pole.

But this did not answer the critics who had told me that I had been too conservative, quoting from books like Physical Geology (by Longwell, Knopf and Flint, 3rd ed., 1948) that "it is estimated that the complete wastage of all the glacier ice existing today would return enough water to the sea to raise its level about 100 feet. This would drown vast areas of land, much of it densely populated and would submerge large parts of such cities as New York, Boston, London and Hamburg."

The strongest quote came from a professional geologist in Berke-

■

ley who found that Dr. Ahlmann, former professor of geography at the University of Stockholm, had written that "on the basis of the French results in. Greenland, Andr6 Cailleux is quite right in

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

saying that previous estimates of the world's existing glacier ice are too small. He calculates that the total volume of land ice must be between 26 and 36 million cubic kilometers. Melting of this volume of ice would raise the sea level by some 65 to 90 meters. Even after making allowance for isostatic adjustments, the rise would be from 43 to 60 meters. Now, as

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