Viral meme misrepresenting melting of ice claims Sea Level Rise is a Hoax

CLAIM

Meme proves that global warming and melting ice have no effect on sea levels 

FACT

The meme cannot prove that melting ice sheets do not cause a rise in sea levels. It misrepresents the change in volume when land ice melts and flows into the oceans as it considers only the floating ice or icebergs. There is also no mention of the other factors influencing the rise in water levels.

WHAT THEY SAY

Multiple posts going viral across social media platforms over some time claim that the phenomenon of Sea Level Rise due to Global Warming is actually a hoax. A collage of two images of a jar of water with ice cubes floating on it and melting into it accompanies the posts as evidence that sea-level rise is false as there is no displacement, therefore no increase in water level in the jug. 

SOURCE OF THE CLAIM:

This is the collage being shared across social media platforms

WHAT WE FOUND

We came across an article on the NASA website, published in October 2021, with the headline “Five Facts to Help You Understand Sea Ice,” which states NASA has tracked sea ice minimum (usually in September) and maximum (usually in March) extents since 1978. While the exact extent figures may vary year to year, it’s clear that the Arctic is losing sea ice year-round.

WHAT CAUSES SEA LEVEL RISE?

We came across a 2017 video uploaded on the official channel of the European Space Agency (ESA), which describes the physical processes causing global sea-level rise. It helps in understanding the causes clearly: 

We also came across an infographic by NASA on Sea Level Rise which has information on the causes and effects of the melting of ice across continents. NASA’s site on Sea Level change has a lot of articles and data on the rise of sea levels across the world, making it clear that it impacts the planet in various ways. 

SEA LEVEL RISE IS ACCELERATING 

We also came across a study published on the United Nations Climate Change website in February 2022 that says sea-level rise from melting ice sheets is ‘accelerating around the world and the annual rate of the rise could more than triple every year by 2100’.

THERMAL EXPANSION OF WATER

The same article also highlights the fact that Climate change is driving ocean rise through two phenomena: the rapid melting of ice at the poles and the increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ‘This latter phenomenon warms the temperature of the water. Hot water – less dense than cold water – takes up more space, causing the ocean to expand,’ it states. 

This article elaborates on the thermal expansion of water.

SIMPLE EXPERIMENT TO UNDERSTAND SEA-LEVEL RISE

The contents of the meme can actually be debunked quite clearly with an educational activity titled “What’s Causing Sea-Level Rise? Land Ice Vs. Sea Ice,” which we came across on the NASA website. This activity for students consists of building simple models to demonstrate the differing impacts of melting land ice and sea ice on the sea-level rise thus helping one to visually observe the link between ice melting on land and sea-level rise. 

HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS SAY

We reached out to our in-house expert, climate scientist, Dr. Partha J Das. Here’s what he said on the topic:

“The said meme does not and cannot deny the observed rise in global sea level which is a result of the human-induced global warming and climate change that has occurred mainly the last 150 years of the human history on the earth. 

The two main reasons are:

(1) The experiment referred to in the meme considers only the melting of the sea ice (floating ice like icebergs, ice-shelves) only as the sole contributor to the sea level increase. But in reality, it is the melting of the land-based ice (for example glaciers, permafrost, the ice sheet in Greenland, the continental ice mass in Antarctica, etc.) that contributes almost entirely to the increase in sea heights. Actually, the volume of water flows out to the sea and ocean therefore, the sea level rises more from the meltwater that comes from the land-ice masses. Melting of floating ice adds negligibly to the rise in sea level. The meme does not consider the land-ice contribution, which makes it a non-starter as a scientific demonstration to negate the well-established observations of global sea-level rise.

(2) A large part of the sea of the level rise, approximately 34%, can be attributed to the thermal expansion of water which happens due to increasing temperatures on and near the earth’s surface.

The said meme considers only the sea ice, not the land ice. The actual physical processes linked with the observed sea-level increase are complicated and multi-layered, which cannot be explained by oversimplified high-school grade science experiments like this.”