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Comment by gengelbro | Hacker News Reader

"Doomsday Glacier".

At some point we'll run out of hyperbole right? What could be worse than doomsday? Perhaps, apocalypse? Maybe cataclysm?

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I think it's a good word for 2-10 feet of sea level rise.

IPCC v5 is predicting .3 to 0.6 meters of sea level rise by 2100. That's about 1-2 feet over the next 80 years.

Maybe we can stop with the extremism, especially for something as well measured as sea-level.

These studies from The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration go into new next IPCC assessments.

Massive localized events resulting from geographic features are not part of current IPCC models.

That's fine and I'm all for new theories and new models, but let's let them actually make it into the IPCC and see how they are peer reviewed, how the findings are reproduced and assessed by other scientists, etc, especially before multiplying current consensus estimates by a factor of 10. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that.

Without minimizing the seriousness of what it is... "Doomsday"? For two feet of sealevel rise? (And over 80 years, if rsj_hn is correct?) No. Just no. You have way too wimpy an idea of Doomsday.

2 feet of sea level rise could easily end civilisation as we know it.

I'm calling BS on that.

If it's not BS, let's hear your mechanism.

Not to belittle the impact, but I don't think this is "doom". If even 5 feet over normal high tide makes a difference with where you are on the coast, then you are experiencing frequent seasonal flooding, and are almost certainly getting completely devistated every 20-50 years. Coastal people, that near to the waterline, understand that they're on borrowed time. The time between being leveled will definitely decrease, but it's in the cultural memory in these places. It's not going to be doom, because it's not going to be some unforeseen transient in their experience. They're not going to have structures they expect to be there next winter within 4ft of sea level. It'll be more frequent devastation, with a slow, eventual, loss of will to put up with it. But, it will be slow. A 2ft transient isn't going to destroy anything, except areas that get destroyed multiple times a year already.

Imagine if you lived on a pacific island, too bad I guess ?

Yes, this is one of the areas that are flooded seasonally, and devastated every 20-50 years. To put it into perspective, the tidal range in the pacific islands is around 2 feet. Yearly storm surges go from 5 to 20 ft (hurricane required for the upper range). This is why there are surprisingly few buildings at risk [1]. Nobody builds/rebuilds where frequent destruction happens. People are smarter than that. People will slowly move inland, which is unfortunate to those at the perimiter. But I don't think this is "doom".

1. https://cop23.unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/...

given that the melting of the thing could cause ocean levels to rise by up to amost a meter (or even more if it has a cascading effect on other ice masses in the area) that is actually appropriately named.

OK, then what do you call something astronomically worse than this, say a mile wide astroid strike?

You see that you have no more granularity? That you can't describe it as worse than a meter of sea level rise?

I don't think we need more granularity, but you could propose a more appropriate word for a global catastrophe of this scale then.

Utter nonsense, and goes against any known physics.

If an iceberg is already floating in the ocean, then it has already displaced that ocean by an amount.

Just in exactly the same way an ice cube has already displaced surrounding water in a glass.

If or when the aforementioned iceberg melts, there will be no further raising of sea level - because the level was already displaced.

Same as with the ice cube in the glass of water.

If you've read the article you will have found the explanation there. The problem isn't the already floating ice, which indeed does not rise the sea level, but the land ice the floating mass is attached to.

And that's because of the high geothermal activity underneath the glacier. [0]

Nothing to do with cLiMaTe ChAnGe.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00242-3 - "High geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica inferred from aeromagnetic data" - 17-Aug-2021

Climate change is one contributor to the dynamics of that glacier, so yes it has a lot to do with it, but either way this has nothing to do with your original post, in which you apparently weren't even aware of the fact that the melting of the glacier would rise the sea level which your provided source also states, so I'm glad we have at least made progress on that front.

This user is pasting this one study all over this thread, and now has mockery and belittlement. He's likely an astroturf troll.

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