How high would the sea level rise if all ships and boats were removed ?

Question

Would the planet flood?

Answer 1

Archimedes will be turning in his grave...

Answer 2

the sea level would fall by the weight of water by which the boats are displacing, so basically how ever much all the boats in the world weigh, the same weight in water would be required to fill all those holes in the sea left by the boats, causing the sea level overall to fall

I cannot for the life of me find the mass of all boats and ships in the world (it is I would guess a nearly impossible and immensely time consuming task).

the amount by which the global sea level would fall is fairly negligible, if at all noticeable, if you think that the world has an area of 361 million sq km covered by oceans it is unlikely that there are to be major changes

hope this helps

Answer 3

Guess it would drop. It's all to do with displacement. The planet won't flood because everything that's on it has always been on it and gets recycled one way or another. When I was little I used to think that eventually it would become too heavy because all the people that ever were are still on it as a bag of bones - thus increasing the weight! I'm told now that what's there in bones now, was there before!

Answer 4

The planet wouldn't flood, becasue if you take everything out of the sea, then the level will go down.

Simple logic. You put something into water, and the level gets higher. Why? Because theres more particles there. You take something out, and woah, the water level goes down. There's less particles there.

So all in all, we'd be less prone to flooding than we are now.

Answer 5

The sea level would actually drop, but it would only be a tiny amount, less than a thousandth of a millimeter.

Float something in a glass of water. Note where the water comes to. Now remove the floating object. What happens to the level of the water? It goes down.

Answer 6

Saw this answered in a magazine recently, though I can't remember which, sorry. The basic gist was sea level would rise by some 0.025% if all the world's shipping was removed. Which is a very small amount indeeed. Don't lose any sleep over it!

Answer 7

I think the sea level would fall as the boats displace the water pushing it up! But I'm not sure! I guess that it woudn't make much of a difference!

Answer 8

Take the density of sea water = w, (it is close to 1, anyway).

A ship floating in the sea would displace a volume of water whose mass will be equal to its mass .

If the total mass of all ships is M, they will displace water of volume

V = M / w

Divide the volume by the surface area of the sea (A), to get the height of displacement:

H = V / A.

The level would fall by this height if all the ships were removed.

(I have assumed that the average density of ships floating in the sea to be greater than that of sea water, fair enough!)

Answer 9

If all those objects were removed the sea level would go DOWN not up. If you put something in water it displaces the water causing the water level to rise, remove those objects and the water level would go back down.

Answer 10

We had this one a few weeks back. I won't repeat the calculations, but based on the global shipping tonnage, I worked out an average sea level drop of about 1/100 of a millimetre!

Answer 11

Water levels would fall!
Every time you put something into water, you displace the equivalent volume of water.
As boats and ships go into the water, theoretically the water rises a miniscule amount. Remove them all, and it would sink back to fill the volume of boats removed.