24 days of kitchen oceanography
Each day a new experiement will be posted here. Reveal what is hidden behind the windows by clicking on the arrows below.
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Sea level rise
Why is there water dripping into the fuller glass?
Experiment 22:
We fill two glasses with water. Into one, we place an ice cube. We then adjust water levels so that they are the same in both glasses. We then place a second ice cube on a fork that rests across the second glass, such that melt water will drip into that second glass. After a while we observe that water levels are staying the same in the glass with the floating ice cube, whereas the water level in the glass into which the meltwater is dripping is slowly raising.
This is analogous to glacial melt and melting sea ice: Sea ice that is floating in the water already doesn’t contribute to sea level rise when it melts. Ice that is resting on land but then melting into the ocean, however, does contribute to sea level rise since that water is newly added to the ocean’s volume.