• Question: you now they that if the ice caps melt the sea will rise by at least 60-70 metres. I'm wondering if marine life would increase by at least 50% and would it be better for humans and other animals or would it be better for marine life. What do you think?

    Asked by elmocho to Clare, Dave, Glo, Ozge, Sean on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Dave Sproson

      Dave Sproson answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      60-70 metres is the estimate of sea-level rise if the Antarctic and Greenland lost all of their ice (about 60 from Antarctica and between 5 and 10 from Greenland). However, it’s pretty unlikely that all of this ice will melt, and if it does it won’t be for a very long time.

      However, we are allowed to think about these things hypothetically – in fact this is a really useful thing to do as a scientist!

      For marine life: I’m not really sure. I guess the sea-level rise would open up new shelf-seas where coral reefs and such-like could grow, but at the same time, current reefs would probably find themselves in water that’s too deep for them, so things may balance out.

      Would it be good fur humans? Well, certainly not to start with! Nearly all of the world’s biggest cities are on or near the coast, so such a big sea level rise would certainly put many of them underwater. But this would happen slowly enough that people would be able to move – and maybe it would give us a chance to build better, more efficient cities – who knows? Do you have any opinions about it? We’d love to hear them in the comments!

    • Photo: Clare Woulds

      Clare Woulds answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I’m not sure that there would be 50% more marine life, but I guess there would be more habitat for it. It wouldn’t be very good for humans, as many of them live within 70 vertical metres of the sea, so they would have to move (and there wouldn’t be room). Marine life would probably do better, although if sea level rose too fast the some corals could not grow fast enough to keep up and so might die.

    • Photo: Gloeta Massie

      Gloeta Massie answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      Unfortunately, the very factors that would cause those ice caps to melt would also probably cause the sea water to become more acidic – bad, bad news for most of our favorite animals. Add to the mass migrations of people – also generally bad news (we humans don’t tend to deal really well with mass migrations into our homes) – that isn’t the happiest looking future. Hopefully, young people such as yourself can help us figure a way out of this mess!!!

    • Photo: Ozge Ozkaya

      Ozge Ozkaya answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Well I dont know if it would be good or bad but things would definetely change. Everything is on a fine equilibrium and a change of such large scale is bound to disrupt the equilibrium. Some marine organisms couldnt cope witht the change and die and that is bound to affect other organisms that feed on them. But some other organisms would adapt of course and some new ones would thrive until a new equilibrium is established. Changing environements are the driving force of evolution, the ones that can adapt survive others die which makes life possible for completely new life forms. For instance mammals didnt have a chance to survive when the dinosaures were around, so if the dinosaures werent extinct there was no chance humans would have evolved!

    • Photo: Sean Clement

      Sean Clement answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Wow, it appears that most of the guys above have covered the most of it. I want to touch on Daves mention of Coral Reefs being affected. There are many, many ‘deep reef’ environments that we actually know relatively little about. We didn’t think that there were that many of them until recently because it was thought that there wasn’t enough light beyond depths of 50m to fuel the growth of Hard Corals. Then they started to find them at depths of over 150m! Really incredible stuff!

      Sea level rise could have a really bad effect on these corals though as it could push them into depths that they can’t survive in. We don’t know much about these deep water reefs and the wider role they place in the ocean ecosystem so there is a chance that, if they suffer from this shift to greater depths, there may be repercussions that we don’t even know about yet…

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