Will rapid glaciar movement cause it to completely slide into the ocean in one catastrophic event?

Question

After watching "NOVA" last night on PBS about global warming and the incredible increase in glaciar movement due to melt water deep below the glacier ( between the glacier and solid rock ), will this glacier completely slide into the ocean in one event and cause a tsunami of hundres of feet high and posibly circle the globe?

Are government leaders in the U.S. aware of this posibility and thair's a conspiracy to hide the truth from the public?

Is it too late to do anything about it?

Is the U.S.A. to blame for what will happen to our planet?

Is this event the next "MASS EXTINCTION"?

So many question, so little answers...

Answer 1

You can rest easy on this one.

No, an entire glacier will not slip off into the ocean all at once causing a massive global tsunami that wipes out the entire world.

For one thing, a glacier is a very large collection of ice, which usually has a collection of impurities, such as rocks, plants, frozen mamoths, and such inside it. These objects inside the glacier have a different structural strength and flexibility than the ice, so the ice tends to crack around them.

Even if the glacier were pure ice, ice only has so much rigidity, and as it grinds it's way toward the sea through the winding valley it inhabits, the glacier will naturally break up into chunks of various sizes.

As the glacier nears the coast line, these different chunks begin to break off, forming ice burgs of different sizes. This naturally limits the size of any one ice burg, and that in turn limits the possible tsunami scale waves to rather small splashes. In fact, to get bigger ice burgs, the part where the ice enters the water must be closer to the same height, so a splash from a very big ice burg would instead be a small ripple as it goes down a much shorter distance in falling into the sea.

You could go through some complicated equations to figure out just how big a piece of ice could possibly fall into the ocean at any one time, and how far it would fall to figure out just how big a wave it could make, and then determine how far such a wave could propagate before it died out like ripples in a pond, but the basic fact is that no ice burg could cause a massive tidal wave.

Presumably, if the water under the glacier melted really fast, the entire glacier might fall into the ocean, forming many, many small splashes as each piece broke and fell, but again, water is not a perfect lubricant, and this will limit the rate at which they fall, which will prevent a single catastrophic tidal wave, although under certain circumstances, the ice burgs might fall in a pattern that produced very choppy water that ships wouldn't be able to sail in... but again, not on a global scale.

Are government leaders in the US aware of this posibility? NO! government leaders are barely even aware of how to get themselves re-elected.

Is it too late to do anything about it? Umm, no. We could build enormous mirrors in various parts of the world to reflect more sunlight back into space, which should reduce the effects of global warming to some extent. That, along with using jets to produce global dimming, and changing to less polluting equippment to reduce greenhouse gasses might keep the ice burgs from falling too fast to make choppy water.

Is the USA to blame for what will happen to our planet? of course. With a population of less than half that of China or india, and much cleaner resources we are obviously the major polluters in the world.

Is this event the next "Mass Extinction?" only for fish that get in the way of the falling ice bergs.

Answer 2

I don't think this is possible, just based on common sense. I say this first because the many glaciers that are in the world would all have to melt all at once which isn't likely to happen. Second many of them exist in mountains away from the ocean which means their slide will be stopped by other mountains and valleys.

I think another thing to think about is that the earth has under gone many ice ages and ages without ice, therefore there isn't anything anyone can do to stop the thaw of the glaciers nor to stop the next ice age.

Answer 3

truly! i did not comprehend that Christians were so dumb to understand and believe even straight forward verses like those: Matt 24:36-37 "yet almost about that day and hour no human being knows, no longer even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, although the daddy purely..." enable me see what kinda Christians believe such issues....