Melting glaciers won’t flood Baffin

Two Toronto researchers have been studying Greenland’s icecap to see what will happen to nearby sea levels if it melts. The conclusion: They will drop.

The findings were released by University of Toronto scientists Jerry Mitrovica and Mark Tamisiea in the current edition of the journal Nature.

Global sea level is considered to be a good indicator of global warming, but scientists have been pu led over why the rise isn’t the same everywhere.

Mitrovica and Tamisiea wanted to understand why, if Greenland’s ice cap was really melting, tidal gauges weren’t rising nearby — in Northern Europe, for instance — while they were rising in other regions.

They finally concluded that huge ice sheets exert a gravitational pull on water over a radius of 2,000 kilometres. This means they pull the sea level up, and when they melt the sea level actually goes down in the surrounding area.

“If Greenland is melting continuously, as it is, the contribution from that melting would be a sea level drop in that region,” Tamisiea told the Nunatsiaq News.

Sea levels around Greenland could appear to drop more dramatically because there’s also a tendency for land to rise when glaciers disappear.

Tamisiea did caution that other factors, such as thermal expansion of water — that is, its tendency to expand when heated — could come into play, and end up compensating for any drop in sea level around the melted ice caps.