What if poles melt

Subscriber Account active since. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Narrator: Ninety-nine percent of all freshwater ice on Earth is sitting on top of Greenland and Antarctica, and each year, a little more of it melts into the ocean.

Normally, it would take hundreds to thousands of years for it all to melt away. But what if something happened that caused a massive global melt overnight? As we slept, sea levels would rise by a whopping 66 meters. While all this chaos ensues aboveground, something equally sinister is happening below.

All that rising saltwater will infiltrate groundwater reserves farther inland, forcing its way into nearby freshwater aquifers. You know, the ones that supply our drinking water, irrigation systems, and power-plant cooling systems? All those aquifers would be destroyed. Not good. This will wreak havoc on our ocean currents and weather patterns. It is going to be exposed, and we don't know what's going to happen.

It may actually change how long a day is. The ice sheets are close to the axis of rotation of the Earth — they are around the poles. You melt this ice, and where this water will go is around the Earth, so further away from the axis of rotation. So the Earth is going to spin at a slower rate. Inverse asked a series of experts about five different scenarios for our planet by Read the rest: a supervolcano explodes , an asteroid impact , a pandemic wipes out 10 percent of humanity , and humans stop global warming.

Future Earth What would happen if the polar ice caps melted? Predominantly desert, the continent would gain a new inland sea—but it would lose much of the narrow coastal strip where four out of five Australians now live. East Antarctica: The East Antarctica ice sheet is so large—it contains four-fifths of all the ice on Earth—that it might seem unmeltable.

It survived earlier warm periods intact. Lately it seems to be thickening slightly—because of global warming. The warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which falls as snow on East Antarctica. But even this behemoth is unlikely to survive a return to an Eocene Climate.

West Antarctica: Like the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic one was apparently much smaller during earlier warm periods. It's vulnerable because most of it sits on bedrock that's below sea level. The warming ocean is melting the floating ice sheet itself from below, causing it to collapse. Since it has averaged a net loss of 65 million metric tons of ice a year. All rights reserved. This story appears in the September issue of National Geographic magazine.

Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. But the rising temperature and icebergs could play a small role in the rising ocean level. Icebergs are chunks of frozen glaciers that break off from landmasses and fall into the ocean. As soon as the ice falls into the ocean, the ocean rises a little. If the rising temperature affects glaciers and icebergs, could the polar ice caps be in danger of melting and causing the oceans to rise?

This could happen, but no one knows when it might happen. The main ice covered landmass is Antarctica at the South Pole, with about 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of its fresh water.

Antarctica is covered with ice an average of 2, meters 7, feet thick. If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters feet. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.

At the other end of the world, the North Pole, the ice is not nearly as thick as at the South Pole. The ice floats on the Arctic Ocean.