Friday, April 23, 2010

Future floods?


The Earth is much more heavily populated today than it was when the great Ice Age floods occurred. If floods of the magnitude that resulted from the draining of Lake Agassiz or carving the Scablands were to happen today, the impact on humanity would be catastrophic.

Fortunately, the risk of huge, glacially induced floods like those of the Pleistocene is negligible. The mega floods of the Pleistocene were associated with continental ice sheets. Today, the only remaining continental ice sheets are in Greenland and Antarctica, and neither land mass contains large ice-dammed lakes.

Iceland’s volcanism can produce sub-glacial lakes that could cause flooding there, but not on the scale of the megafloods of the Pleistocene.

That isn’t to say that Earth is free of flood hazards; if global warming were to melt the continental ice sheets sea-level would rise 215 feet or 65 meters* but that’s another story.

* http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/2004-11-21-melting-polar-ice_x.htm

Image: World map showing sea level if all current ice were to melt http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/earthicefree.jpg

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