SeaLevel_Exercise1

Name: Sea Level Exercise (from NASA) Part 1. Sea level if the world was Ice Free. For this exercise, think of the oceans and adjacent seas as a large glass of water. This is sea level at the present. However, above and connected to that glass is an ice bucket with a couple cubes of ice. If we keep the temperature of the ice below 0°C then the water level doesn’t change. If we allow the ice bucket to warm up, the ice melts and flows through a tube into the glass, raising the water level in the glass. To calculate the water rise, we need to know the area of the glass and the volume of water of the melted ice. There is one trick. Ice floats in water and therefore is less dense. Fresh water is 1 gm/cc and ice is about 0.9 gm/cc. Once you calculate the volume to the ice, you need to multiply that by 0.9 to get the volume of water added once the ice melts. When you have the volume of water added, then divide by surface water of the glass and that will give the height that the water will rise. Step 1 is to calculate the surface area of the oceans and adjacent seas (equivalent to the surface area of the glass). Below are the areas for the relevant water bodies. I would copy the table below and drop it into excel and use =SUM() but you can add them up one at a time if you want. Table with water areas on the Earth Ocean or Sea Area (in square kilometers) Pacific Ocean 166,241,700 Atlantic Ocean 82,522,600 Indian Ocean 73,426,500 Arctic Ocean 14,056,000 Caribbean Sea 2,512,300 Mediterranean Sea 2,509,700 Bering Sea 2,266,250 Gulf of Mexico 1,554,000 Sea of Okhotsk 1,528,100 East China Sea 1,248,400 Sea of Japan 1,007,500 Hudson Bay 822,300 North Sea 575,000 Black Sea 479,150 Red Sea 437,700 Baltic Sea 422,170 Remaining surface water area 9,522,630 Total surface area (km 2 ): 361,132,000km 2 Step 2. Calculate the volume of ice in Antarctica and Greenland (Area x thickness)