What Will Happen If The North Pole And The South Pole Melt?

The northern ice cap is entierly ice floating on sea water. Should it melt completely the biggest change will be to the salt content of the surrounding sea, it will not alter the sea level as by sitting on the water already it has displaced the same amount of water it contains as ice. It will affect wildlife that lives on the polar ice cap (Pola Bears, Seals etc) but will not affect man to any great extent.

There are some land masses connected to the northern Ice cap (Iceland and parts of Canada for example) but the amount of run off will make hardly any difference.

The southern ice cap does have a land mass under it, however some of the (the Ice Shelves in particular) are also already displacing sea water which they float on. The best estimates are that if the Southern Polar ice cap melts, the sea will rise two to three feet. Obviously the wildlife will be severely affected and also world wide this could cause serious problems for lowland areas.

There will not be ses level rises of the predicted 3 meters as was first thought as the scientists initially forgot that a lot of the melting ice was already floating on water and therefore would not add to the sea level when it did melt, as the water was already displaced.

If this does happen there will be open sea at the north pole and a land mass at the south pole. Undoubted there will be environmental changes world wide, but the best guesses as to what are still only speculation.

Indeed sea levels will raise and salt water mixing with the melted fresh water will have profound effect on the sea living creatures.
But the single most thing that will impact everything is the greenhouse gases, a humongous quantities of methane is trapped under the arctic ice caps. Methane is really really dangerous than carbon di oxide, it is over 20 times more effective than trapping the heat in the atmosphere than carbon di oxide. This will lead to faster depletion of ozone layer and thus affecting every living planet on the Earth, including humans.

So it is not about saving Earth, because Earth will survive my any means as it has done for the past 4 and half billion years. It is the plants and the animals that need to be saved for ultimately to save the human race from extinction.

I recommend watching an amazing program from BBC: Earth - the power of the planet:
www.bbc.co.uk

The animals which live on the ice will become extinct.
The sea temperatures will rise.
The sea levels will rise.

How long do you think the life on this planet would last with the extreme temperature it would take to melt all the ice on this planet? Everything will be dead way before we would see a rise in sea levels.

The scientific projections as presented in Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" exhibit that if this melting were to take place, the earth as we know it would be underwater and many millions would perish.

If the north pole and the south pole met, there would be a massive explosion of chemical reactions that would take out the earth. So please don't try it!!!!!