Three strange superpowers, a couple of nukes, and the flooding of the world

[Darkest]

I consider myself, like a few others, to have a strange desire to create a believable alternate history that involves the melting of the icecaps and the maximum flooding of the world. Before I resort to changing the Earth's orbital path or invoking a volcano, I present something else.

Is it Antarctica that has more ice, or the Arctic circle? If it is Antarctica (which would be more interesting), how does the following sound: Argentina, South Africa (probably reformed and swiftly assimilating African nations) and Australia becomes the leading superpowers. Whether the U.S. or other countries remain/become superpowers, it matters little.

They get angry at each other for some reason, and engage in a three-sided war. They get to the point where they are sending long-distance missiles across Antarctica (where they can reach their opponents better). They eventually develop an extremely powerful nuke that can go on long-distance flights. One of the nations sends such a nuke on a flight-path to its enemies. An erratic, fluke of a horrendous blizzard strikes and the nuke falls to the ice and explodes.

So, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.

- How would you get Argentina, South Africa, and Australia (or alternate nations at such locations) to become superpowers?
- How would you get all of these nations so angry with each other they would resort to nuking them (and using very powerful nukes)?
- What would happen if Antarctica was nuked? Mind you, the nuclear device could consume nearly the entire landmass. I don't think the ice would just melt, I think it would be vaporized. What would happen then? Could global flooding occur (at least in the long term)?
- How much of the world's ice is located in Antarctica? It takes more than 80% of the worlds ice to melt for things to get interesting, so global flooding may require more than one accidental nuke.

Thank you! Extra points if you could make this a future history (no POD, just continue from year 2005) and in the near future (2005-2050).

[Doctor What]

For a nuke to be powerful enough to actually melt just 10% of the ice in Antarctica (never mind enough to create the flooding effect you're looking for) would be bad as such a nuke would be many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything ever invented in OTL--and the radiation/shock wave/dust cloud from such a blast would kill far more people than the actual flooding from the melted ice. Is there an ASB effect going on here that will protect us from this?

As for the amount of ice locked up in Antarctica, 90% of the ice on Earth is there. If all the ice in Antarctica were to melt, the oceans would rise about 200 feet. And Antarctica is huge--it's roughly the same size as the continental U.S. and mexico combined--and the ice there is hundreds of feet thick (thousands in some places). Like I said--any nuke that can destroy something this big is impossible to build by our current technology. Even multiple hits by nukes wouldn't do the job--if you concentrated the missiles at one big glacier near the edge, you might shatter it---but all this will do is raise the sea level by a few inches at most.

Oh--and there's a few volcanoes there as well.

I like the Waterworld idea myself but you need a better POD.

Sorry.

Oh--Antarctica has it's own newspaper (http://www.polar.org/antsun/oldissues2003-2004/Sun012504/depressedEarth.htm)

[PJ Norris]

Argentina, South Africa (probably reformed and swiftly assimilating African nations) and Australia becomes the leading superpowers.

I like superpower Australia, although I don't know if you'd get Sth Africa and Argentina into the superpower category in our lifetime. Maybe superpowers in the SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE other than that :confused:

Why would anyone nuke Antarctice anyway? Is South Africa jealous of the penguins? I'm not making fun, just scutinizing.

[Forum Lurker]

I think the best way to get the Antarctic ice to melt as a direct result of deliberate action is going to be terrorism. A properly placed nuclear blast could probably break off one of the major ice shelves, and it's much easier to build a nuclear weapon of great size if it does not need to survive transport by missile or bomb, and has no size limitations beyond the ability of the terrorists to transport its component parts over the ice.

[reformer]

Well, we could start bribing the penguins to start randomly droping matches...

[Tielhard]

Doctor W :eek: hat wrote:

"As for the amount of ice locked up in Antarctica, 90% of the ice on Earth is there. If all the ice in Antarctica were to melt, the oceans would rise about 200 feet."

This is a bit of an overestimate. Loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet (which all the evidence suggests is going to happen in the next 100 years) will raise mean sea level 18'. Loss of the remaining Antartic ice will raise this to a total of around 60'. If the Arctic ice cap melts it will reduce mean sea level slightly as it does not rest upon land. The effect of the loss of the Greenland ice sheet is currently the object of some scientific discussion, some are of the opinion it could add in excesss of 6' to the total rise.

The simple rise in mean sea level would have a minimal effect on humanity compared with what would happen if the Antarctic ice sheets breach. If the West sheet breaches in one piece we will see tsunami well in excess of 200' perhaps even half a kilometer high in places and it will be concentrated North up through the Atlantic. Europe, eastern South America, west Africa, the eastern US and the Gulf would all be severely flooded with only hours or a day or so's notice. If the Eastern ice sheet goes as one event (fairly unlikely) the size of the transient hydrodynamic effects is nearly unimaginable.

It is easy to imagine a breach of the West Antarctic ice sheet being induced by appropriately positioned atomic/thermonuclear charges. I suspect a missile would not be enough, they need to be positioned below the fracture line of the sheet.

A second megadeath alternative which might have a lesser effect on the overall biosphere of the planet whilst causing maximum destruction would be to detonate a number of atomic/thermonuclear devices well below the Antarctic ice cap so that it vapourises the sea water below it rather than the ice itself raising it a great distance into the air. this would cause massive tsunami both going up and crashing down. The ice cap would of course be shattered and may not reform.

[Justin Green]

Ive heard that if the icesheets in Antartica and Greenland melt, the actual land underneith will rise by several feet now that its not under billions of pounds of ice. Im not sure how much though.

[DuQuense]

?How about a Dr No/Brofield Scenario where 00James doesn't stop him?

?Or a Arab Water Mining [Nuke powered Melter, pumping water into tankers] goes amiss?
I've heard that if the ice-sheets in Antarctica and Greenland melt, the actual land underneath will rise by several feet

I believe the estimates are in the range of 2-3 centimeters per year for the next several centuries.

A Militarist Government takes power in Argentina, forcefully annexes Chile and Uruguay. and goes on a determined, development path, Like China or 1930's Germany.

[Mike Stearns]

I think the best way to get the Antarctic ice to melt as a direct result of deliberate action is going to be terrorism. A properly placed nuclear blast could probably break off one of the major ice shelves, and it's much easier to build a nuclear weapon of great size if it does not need to survive transport by missile or bomb, and has no size limitations beyond the ability of the terrorists to transport its component parts over the ice.

I think Forum Lurker has the most likely scenario. I could see a situation where eco terrorists place a series of nuclear weapons in the shear zones of the Antarctic ice shelves and then set them off causing large amounts of ice break off and begin to melt.

[Forum Lurker]

I wouldn't expect ecological ideals to be the driving force; after all, the tsunami from the ice shelf dropping would probably destroy a large fraction of the hemisphere's coastal biomes. I'd expect it to be some group or another which happens to have a mountainous geographic origin, and have opponents with coastal holdings; the Basque separatists or some of the Idaho-based militant groups spring to mind.

[Tielhard]

Bloody well supplied and funded these terrorist johnnies. Nuclear weapons AND the resurces to get them under the Antarctic ice shelf. Can't we just invoke the ASBs, it is a bit more believable!

[Forum Lurker]

Nuclear weapons aren't actually as hard to get as we'd like to think. As I recall, uranium weapons, while markedly less powerful, are easier to produce than the plutonium preferred by missile and bomb manufacturers. The key here is that this isn't a bomb or a missile, but rather, in essence, a mine. That means that it can use a far less mass-efficient design, use an order of magnitude more conventional explosive to squeeze as much power as possible out of the available material, and needs far less in the way of microscopic machining tolerances. Basically, all they need is a big lump of uranium and they're set. That, they can acquire from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, or if they're particularly daring and impatient a raid on civilian nuclear reactor fuel resupply.

[Mike Stearns]

Yeah, they could do that or they could just buy some from Canada. We have some of the largest uranium and richest deposits in the world.

[Tielhard]

If it were that easy someone would have done it by now.

Mr. Bin Laden is/was a smart guy and had lots of zlotties behind him and yet he had to resort to using aeroplanes against the World Trades Centre. If atomic weapons were as easy as you suggest there would not only be no WTC now, there would be no NYC either.

[Count Dearborn]

Read Cussler's Atlantis Found, for a good senario. A little in the ASB zone for today, but maybe not in the next few decades. A company controlled by a group of Nazi descendents try to use nano-tech to cut the Ross Ice Sheet off from Antartica; supposedly to cause a pole shift.

[Forum Lurker]

If it were that easy someone would have done it by now.

Mr. Bin Laden is/was a smart guy and had lots of zlotties behind him and yet he had to resort to using aeroplanes against the World Trades Centre. If atomic weapons were as easy as you suggest there would not only be no WTC now, there would be no NYC either.

Using such a nuclear device against New York would be rather tricky. They wouldn't be able to ship it as components, and size and stability would become factors. The more able your target is to resist efforts to blow it up, the more sophisticated a device you need; I submit that very few targets offer less resistance than completely uninhabited geographic regions.

[Jared]

I consider myself, like a few others, to have a strange desire to create a believable alternate history that involves the melting of the icecaps and the maximum flooding of the world. Before I resort to changing the Earth's orbital path or invoking a volcano, I present something else.

Is it Antarctica that has more ice, or the Arctic circle? If it is Antarctica (which would be more interesting), how does the following sound: Argentina, South Africa (probably reformed and swiftly assimilating African nations) and Australia becomes the leading superpowers. Whether the U.S. or other countries remain/become superpowers, it matters little.

They get angry at each other for some reason, and engage in a three-sided war. They get to the point where they are sending long-distance missiles across Antarctica (where they can reach their opponents better). They eventually develop an extremely powerful nuke that can go on long-distance flights. One of the nations sends such a nuke on a flight-path to its enemies. An erratic, fluke of a horrendous blizzard strikes and the nuke falls to the ice and explodes.

So, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.

- How would you get Argentina, South Africa, and Australia (or alternate nations at such locations) to become superpowers?
- How would you get all of these nations so angry with each other they would resort to nuking them (and using very powerful nukes)?
- What would happen if Antarctica was nuked? Mind you, the nuclear device could consume nearly the entire landmass. I don't think the ice would just melt, I think it would be vaporized. What would happen then? Could global flooding occur (at least in the long term)?
- How much of the world's ice is located in Antarctica? It takes more than 80% of the worlds ice to melt for things to get interesting, so global flooding may require more than one accidental nuke.

Thank you! Extra points if you could make this a future history (no POD, just continue from year 2005) and in the near future (2005-2050).

The nuclear weapons needed to melt a significant portion of Antarctica would be... well, let's just say that detonating every nuclear weapon that existed at the height of the Cold War wouldn't be enough. There's tens of millions of cubic kilometres of ice there. (Wikipedia says 30 million cubic km). A megabomb wouldn't do it. Hell, even a hundred megabombs wouldn't do it.

The thing to remember is that the law of diminishing returns applies to nuclear weapons and their destructive potential. If we assume, for argument's sake, that a 1 megatonne weapon can melt 1 cubic km of ice, then a 10 megatonne weapon would not melt 10 cubic km of ice. What would happen is that the ice in the centre of the explosion would just get hotter. If there's enough nuclear weapons being deployed to melt a significant portion of Antarctica's ice, then sea level rises would be the least of our problems. Even the cockroaches would have 64 legs.

And as for melting the ice shelves (not the ice sheets)... by definition, an ice shelf floats on water, i.e. it displaces that level of water. It's already at equilibrium. Even if every ice shelf got pushed out to sea and melted, it wouldn't raise the sea level one millimetre. What sea level rises there were would be because warmer water expands, and as far as I know there's not enough water in the ice shelves for this to make a big difference.

Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III

[Forum Lurker]

You wouldn't be trying to melt the ice sheets with a nuke. You'd be trying to crack them, so that natural forces can slide the sheet into the ocean. Not necessarily feasible, but closer.

[Stalin]

Argentina could become a major power if the Great Depression is somehow averted. In OTL, from 1880 to 1930 Argentina became one of the world's 10 wealthiest nations because of agricultural development and foreign investment in infrastructure. Of course, it would still need to avoid the political instability that plagued it from 1930 onwards --which is very doubtful considering that coups were commonly accepted and encouraged at the time.

When it comes to nukes: Maybe Argentina and/or Brazil begin testing weapons around the artic sometime in the 1950's (or earlier, depending on when nukes are developed in this TL).

[Jared]

You wouldn't be trying to melt the ice sheets with a nuke. You'd be trying to crack them, so that natural forces can slide the sheet into the ocean. Not necessarily feasible, but closer.

Crack what? Ice sheets are riven with cracks anyway, but that won't make them slide any faster. They're just glaciers writ very large - think crevasses. It won't make a whit of difference if you use nukes to create a thousand-mile long crack in an ice sheet. It will still flow at the same slow pace it always does (a few cm a year), and close up the crack.

By way of comparison, consider the glacial fields at Prince William Sound, Alaska. In 1964, they were hit by one of the largest earthquakes on record - 9.2 on the Richter scale. This is far larger than the impact from the biggest nuke people could ever build. The land rose by around 6 metres, along the fault line. And this made no difference whatsoever to the glaciers; they just soaked up the energy of the earthquake and kept moving.

Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III

[Forum Lurker]

Saying that an earthquake is larger than a nuclear impact misses the very major distinction: one is a point source. No earthquake can create as much impulse as an instantaneous, localized blast, even if the energies involved are ultimately much greater.

[Jared]

Saying that an earthquake is larger than a nuclear impact misses the very major distinction: one is a point source. No earthquake can create as much impulse as an instantaneous, localized blast, even if the energies involved are ultimately much greater.

Um, check out the energies involved with an earthquake. This one was enough to raise the ground by 6 metres (more, in places) along a fault line for dozens or hundreds of kilometres. If you think that won't have more impact than a nuclear blast, then you need to think again. Nuclear weapons aren't magical weapons of destruction, just rather large (by human standards) explosive devices. The natural energy released in a volcano or earthquake is far, far larger.

And to repeat: there is no way, none, that a nuclear blast would create a 'crack' that would make an entire ice sheet mysteriously start pushing into the sea. The energy required would be many orders of magnitude larger than an earthquake, to say the least. Ice sheets are already pushing into the sea - very slowly. A nuke isn't going to make bugger-all difference to how fast they move. Even if the ice sheet cracks, so what? An ice sheet's movement is driven by the accumulation of more snow turning into ice and slowly pushing. If it just cracks, then the lower part stops moving until the upper part pushes far enough to close the crack. And it keeps on going.

Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III

[Forum Lurker]

Um, check out the energies involved with an earthquake. This one was enough to raise the ground by 6 metres (more, in places) along a fault line for dozens or hundreds of kilometres. If you think that won't have more impact than a nuclear blast, then you need to think again. Nuclear weapons aren't magical weapons of destruction, just rather large (by human standards) explosive devices. The natural energy released in a volcano or earthquake is far, far larger.

I did not say "impact", which is a somewhat nebulous word. I said "impulse", which is an instantaneous measure of change in momentum. A nuclear blast provides a very much larger instantaneous change, because it takes orders of magnitude less time to work than does an earthquake. Exactly what the effects of that on an ice sheet would be, I don't know; I'm not a geologist, much less a cryologist.

[Mike Stearns]

I did not say "impact", which is a somewhat nebulous word. I said "impulse", which is an instantaneous measure of change in momentum. A nuclear blast provides a very much larger instantaneous change, because it takes orders of magnitude less time to work than does an earthquake. Exactly what the effects of that on an ice sheet would be, I don't know; I'm not a geologist, much less a cryologist.

You don't need to be a glaciologist. You're setting up a shockwave in a solid medium, in this case, ice. All you need is a good grasp on physics and to be an explosives expert, specifally nuclear weapons in this case. Although a knowledge of where the stress point on the ice sheet that you want to fragment are located would also be helpful if you want to be successful..

[Peter Cowan]

Regarding the effects of an earthquake as opposed to a nuclear weapon - I suspect the events in the Indian Ocean last Christmas show how devestating an earthquake can be. I rather doubt any nuclear explosion could have mimiced that over such a wide area. Volcanoes provide a similar example - some eruptions can lead to widespread destruction locally coupled with global climatic changes (such as the 1816 'year without a summer' after Tamboura erupted). Aside from spreading radioactivity everywhere (v bad), the tests on places such as bikini atoll did not have these effects.

Massive (and/or sudden) rises in sea level make for good disaster novels and, if some people are right, could be a problem for the near/mid-term future, I'm not sure a nuke would be a feasible cause. Anyhow, I'd go with the terrorists bombing a city - fix up the bomb in a ship and sail it into a port then "boom"

[Jared]

I did not say "impact", which is a somewhat nebulous word. I said "impulse", which is an instantaneous measure of change in momentum. A nuclear blast provides a very much larger instantaneous change, because it takes orders of magnitude less time to work than does an earthquake. Exactly what the effects of that on an ice sheet would be, I don't know; I'm not a geologist, much less a cryologist.

Okay, I'll say this one more time: the energy involved in an earthquake is much, much larger than that in a nuclear blast. No, a nuclear blast is not a much larger change. An earthquake is, for all relevant purposes here, as instantaneous as a nuclear blast. Maybe 10 seconds or longer for a big earthquake, but compared to something like an ice sheet which moves slowly over centuries, that's close enough.

The effect of a nuclear blast on an ice sheet would be a small crater where the blast went, and that's about it. No cracking which would make the whole thing slide mysteriously into the sea. You seem to have no appreciation of how and why ice sheets move, or how massive the things are. Again, think of glaciers. Those things crack all the time, as part of the slow movement. That's what crevasses are. But the crevasses don't make the whole thing suddenly pick up speed and move to the bottom or anything like that. The glacier just keeps on moving at more or less the same speed. There's no special point where a nuke could somehow be made to crack the entire ice sheet, and even if it cracked, so what? This wouldn't make the ice sheet slide anywhere.

Now, the only way to get rid of most of the Antarctic ice sheet is the long-term one: make it so that it melts faster than snow accumulates. That will work, but over centuries or millennia, not a couple of years.

Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III

[LordKalvan]

H. Beam Piper "Future History" had as a starting point a nuclear war between USA and URSS. This war would effectively destroy all the Northern Emisphere, or at least bomb it back to barbarism. The surviving civilization would be concentrated in the Southern Emisphere, and mainly in Argentina and South Africa

[eschaton]

KWIII, you're forgetting two things.

1. The Antarctic isn't exactly well-known for major earthquakes.

2. Humans could place bombs in the ice along major fracture lines. Designed destruction of lesser force, by its nature, can have a greater impact than random destruction.


That said, I don't think it could happen with one bomb. It could happen with several along major ice faults and others to break up the oceanic ice shelves. The West Antarctic is different from other ice sheets because most of it rests below sea level on hydrated sand. It is not, in the long run, geologically stable for this reason. If the West Antartic sat above sea level I would agree with you, because all the cracks in the world would not cause it to flow downhill any faster, but there's no 'downhill' in this case. A lot of studies suggest the Ross and Ronne ice shelves are all that's keeping the West Antarctic 'plugged' in place actually.

[Jared]

KWIII, you're forgetting two things.

1. The Antarctic isn't exactly well-known for major earthquakes.

Which is irrelevant. The point of the comparison was that the energy needed to either melt or fragment a substantial ice sheet is orders of magnitude greater than an earthquake, which is in turn orders of magnitude greater than a nuclear weapon. Even a megabomb. See, once again, the effect of a massive earthquake on the glaciers of Prince William Sound, i.e. none.

2. Humans could place bombs in the ice along major fracture lines.

And the point here is that ice sheets don't have major fracture lines of that nature. It's about as plausible as using a nuclear weapon to fragment the San Andreas fault and make all of California west of the fault slide into the sea. Actually, the use in a fault-line would probably be more plausible.

Designed destruction of lesser force, by its nature, can have a greater impact than random destruction.

It can, as engineers demonstrate whenever they knock down a building. But ice sheets are, well, rather larger.


That said, I don't think it could happen with one bomb. It could happen with several along major ice faults and others to break up the oceanic ice shelves.

There's an important distinction between ice shelves - which float on water - and ice sheets, which don't. Ice shelves could, perhaps, be made to float out to sea. But melting ice shelves won't do bugger-all to the sea level, since the things are already floating and thus displace water. Melt an ice shelf, and the sea level stays right where it was. As can be demonstrated easily enough by putting an ice cube in a glass of water, noting the new water line, and then letting the ice cube melt. The water level will stay the same.

The West Antarctic is different from other ice sheets because most of it rests below sea level on hydrated sand. It is not, in the long run, geologically stable for this reason.

Quite so, but geologically unstable is quite distinct from any forces humans can muster. The West Antarctic sliding into the sea could happen quickly in geological time - over thousands of years.

If the West Antartic sat above sea level I would agree with you, because all the cracks in the world would not cause it to flow downhill any faster, but there's no 'downhill' in this case.

A lot of studies suggest the Ross and Ronne ice shelves are all that's keeping the West Antarctic 'plugged' in place actually.

The studies in question investigate what would happen if the ice shelves were melted through global warming. See, for example:
http://igloo.gsfc.nasa.gov/wais/articles/perspective.html

And it turns out that the difference is when sea levels rise, which can then get underneath the ice sheet, and melt it quickly, in geological terms. The figures quoted in the above article are 4000 to 7000 years.

So yes, if the ice shelves slip out through rising sea levels or even if you could find a fracture point between the ice shelves and the ice sheets (I have severe doubts that a nuke would be enough, but speaking for the sake of argument) then maybe the West Antarctic ice sheet would begin to collapse. But over millennia.

Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III

[eschaton]

As an aside, human actions *could* cause the san andreas fault to have earthquakes. I know I read several years ago that by injecting groundwater into faults (by accident, mind you) in the west, people have made inactive faults more active, as the water literally helps lubricate the plates and allows the plates to slide freely.

You've pretty much convinced me though, though considering how little is know about how glaciation really works (it's just recently they've begun considering ice ages start over a period of a few years, not centuries), I still think it's an outside possibility.

[Mark]

As an aside, human actions *could* cause the san andreas fault to have earthquakes. I know I read several years ago that by injecting groundwater into faults (by accident, mind you) in the west, people have made inactive faults more active, as the water literally helps lubricate the plates and allows the plates to slide freely.

This happened in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, IIRC. The water injection was planned, but the resulting increase in small earthquakes was not.

You've pretty much convinced me though, though considering how little is know about how glaciation really works (it's just recently they've begun considering ice ages start over a period of a few years, not centuries), I still think it's an outside possibility.

Glaciation "works" by having more snow fall than melts each year on average. Even taking extreme snowfall (Michigan Kewenaw peninsula can receive 10+ meters of snow in one winter), you won't get continental glaciers in a few years. The snow compacts over time, melts in the summer, etc. I can't remember the thickness required for movement, but you need about 50 meters of firn (compressed, refrozen snow) before you get ice where plastic deformation occurs (required for the ice to flow). (Of course, other factors such as slope also affect movement.) One glacier was reforming on Mt. St. Helens under very favorable conidtions (fairly high precipitation and a very shaded location), but I haven't heard of it moving yet, 25 yeras later. (I did read that it is shrinking due to increased heat output from the volcano.)

Doctor W :eek: hat wrote:

"As for the amount of ice locked up in Antarctica, 90% of the ice on Earth is there. If all the ice in Antarctica were to melt, the oceans would rise about 200 feet."

This is a bit of an overestimate. Loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet (which all the evidence suggests is going to happen in the next 100 years) will raise mean sea level 18'. Loss of the remaining Antartic ice will raise this to a total of around 60'. If the Arctic ice cap melts it will reduce mean sea level slightly as it does not rest upon land. The effect of the loss of the Greenland ice sheet is currently the object of some scientific discussion, some are of the opinion it could add in excesss of 6' to the total rise.

The references I have had sea level change estimates for total melt down of 20 to 80 meters increase, with 60 to 65 meters being considered most likely. The lower end was an older reference based on 20% less ice and and considering isostatic rebound (the land "bouncing up" from the loss of the weight above it). Even if it was 20 meters, look at the number of major cities that are at elevation less than 20 meters. It would be a problem.

It's easy to forget that the continental glaciers' thicknesses are measured on the order of kilometers. The more recent references estimated 25 million cubic kilometers of ice on dear, old Earth.

I generally agree KWIII's arguments about the nuclear bombs and fractures. Any fractures in the glaciers are going to exist in the upper 50 meters (except possibly where the ice is flowing over a large obstacle), and 50 meters out of 2-3 kilometers isn't much of a crack. Below 50 meters, the ice behaves plasticly and any fractures that form are obliterated by the flowing ice.

[BillHicksRules]

Dear all,

I just thought I would suggest to those who have posted here, that as a matter of light relief you might want to read "Icefire" by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stephens.

It is loosely connected to this topic. The basic synopsis is that terrorists use multiple buried nukes to blow the Ross Ice Shelf into the Arctic Ocean. It causes a huge mega-tsunami.

Cheers

BHR