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hyperion2010

This touches on one of most concerning questions about climate change. The entire west Antarctic ice sheet is predicted to raise sea levels by 16 feet in the northern hemisphere when it collapses [0]. 16 feet is enough to shut every working port in the world. What is the minimum time such a collapse would take? I have a feeling that most labs that model this stuff simply do not publish the minimum (worst case) numbers because no one would believe how quickly globalization could come to a screeching halt.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet

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Lets play with some hypotheticals...

If this happened in a day it would be complete pandemonium. Probably the collapse of globalization as we know it. But Humanity would survive and eventually rebuild.

If this happened in a century it would be gradual enough that republicans could keep denying as they sign the Tulsa/Denver/Omaha International port creation act of 2116.

A decade would be undeniable and would have costs both in life and money. What would those costs really look like? Would we evacuate and build new ports fast enough to keep something that looks like the modern system?

What does this look like in a single gradual year? Port takes time to open and people take time to evacuate. Would the population of New Orleans become residents in a suburb of Omaha on the Bay of Texas? Or could we muster something halfway organized?

The rise we're afraid of is around 4 meters. What you're hypothesizing is several hundred meters.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/USA_topo...

Four meters of mean sea level rise is plenty to completely disrupt global shipping and make many densely populated coastal cities uninhabitable.

In some places, nothing will change. In some places, sea level may decrease. In others, it will be very substantial.

Never mind the effect that the decrease in albedo and the increased heat capacity of liquid water would have.

In terms of timescales - it won't be instant. If the shelf collapses then it'll allow the rapid outflow of the glaciers behind it, but when we say rapid we mean 30km/yr (total guess, depends on so much, could be less, could be much more) rather than 4km/yr.

So far, however, everything has gone worse than our worst published models. I think we're going to see some nightmarish stuff in our lifetimes.

The Bay of Texas reaching Omaha was Hyberbole. The concept of a bay of Texas after a 4 meter rise in see level is reasonable. I just didn't think the specific location of the refugee camp mattered for high level discussion so rather than get lost in the details of Texas geography I picked something exaggerated but readily known to be inland: Omaha Nebraska.

No, the concept of a bay of Texas is not reasonable after a 4m rise. Believe it or not the coast rises pretty fast from the coastline. Here, play around with this: http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/

If you adjust the following to 5 metres, you can get an idea of how much of the coastline would be affected by this rise.

http://www.floodmap.net/

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