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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (1118)	11/23/1999 10:23:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Respond to of 12247

I remember reading a while back about the possibility of the Antarctic icepacks slip sliding their way into the oceans pretty much all at once. Swoooosh. The Antarctic glaciers are sitting on the Antarctic ground, and they are really quite thick. So thick (some of them multiple kilometers thick, if I remember correctly) and so heavy that they have compressed the ground beneath them in some areas to the point where the supporting ground is now below sealevel. Glaciers can move along because their weight creates pressure which creates enough heat to melt a bit of the bottom which then gets slippery. If this melting/slippery process were to speed up a wee bit, the glacier might break free, swoosh out into the ocean all at once, displacing great quantities of ocean water, creating huge tidal waves (2-3 miles high) and raising sea level everywhere a lot all at once. I may have some details wrong, but I think I've got the general idea. This scenario says it could happen far too quickly for anyone without an airplane to get to safety. I read the first chapter of a novel a year or two ago that was based on this premise. In the book an aircraft carrier in the far south Pacific is snapped in two by the tidal wave. For a good description of Mqurice's worry of comets and other astronomical objects dropping into our oceans, you might read Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. About two thirds of it is pretty good, but then they get into survivalism, race wars, and cannibalism.