How does warmer weather effect the earth?

When there is warm weather that means that the ice caps will melt, as they already have started.

If the ice caps melt then the sea level will become 20 feet higher. This will cause the water to cover some land.

It will cover Calcutta India, taking away the homes of 60 million people. It will even eventually cover up the world trade center in New York.

Some of the earth will be underground.

Barry's Response - What has happened in the past? Ice caps covered half of North America and other northern landforms and it melted. I even read somewhere that the great flood with Noah's Ark may have been partially spurred on by glacial meltwater.

Things that make you go hmmm...

Another thing to consider is what happens to sea level if a large chunk of ice floating on water, say an iceberg, melts completely? How does that affect the sea level? It doesn't.

An object displaces the lesser of

1) its mass or
2) its volume

of water when placed in water. Its mass if it floats and its volume if it sinks. Therefore an iceberg displaces its mass because it floats and if it melts its mass does not change as its volume shrinks, leaving the same same volume displaced by the berg's contents.

You can see more detail on the behaviour of floating ice and other objects on thebuoyancy page. I've had this one floating around on the StuffintheAir website a while now.

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