NSF just now figures out Archimedes' buoyancy principle

http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html
Melting of Floating Ice Will Raise Sea Level
Physical experimentation
Logic
Say levels will rise
WUWT say no rise
who is correct????

I got flailed on my guestbook page by one of those types of “don’t you get it???” people. I still don’t get it, I guess. How the NSF could let something like that stand, that is.

Is this the answer to the riddle wuwt/science:
http://home.comcast.net/~pdnoerd/NoerdlingerBrower.pdf
or perhaps another debate comparable to CO2 snow in antarctic?

Archimedes died over two millennium ago.
[NOTE: That’s one millennium, two millennia. -REP, the incurably pedantic moderator]

Interesting …

JJThoms says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:14 am
http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html
Melting of Floating Ice Will Raise Sea Level
Physical experimentation
Logic
Say levels will rise
WUWT say no rise
who is correct????

It says on one image caption that:
Figure 1: A freshwater ice cube floats in a beaker of concentrated saltwater.
What is the concentration ?

Since ice is ever slightly less dense than water, shouldn’t melting sea ice LOWER sea levels (slightly)? — because the volume of the ice will be replaced by a slightly denser fluid. I don’t think Archimedes buoyancy law fully describes what would happen in this scenario…

I’ve seen a couple of calculations showing that it raises it, but basically the effect is insignificant.
See:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Sea-level-rise-due-to-floating-ice.html

I love it when you guys are so adamant when you are wrong.
The NSF statement was only wrong in stating that it was potentially significant (it is too small for that), but it is non-zero, and it isn’t as simple as Archimedes principle.
See also Jenkins and Holland (2007):
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030784.shtml
But carry on gloating.

JJ Thomas, the setting up of experiments which “prove” that it’s worse than we thought, is part and parcel of a fraud being perpetrated.
Sea water salinity in the lower end of the PSU scale is found in, guess where, the Arctic, so a “highly concentrated” saline solution doesn’t reflect the real world at all. Try the following URL for a peak at the real wold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WOA05_sea-surf_SAL_AYool.png

wsbriggs
try the link to the paper where there are sum simple sums with real world data!

JJThoms says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:14 am
http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html
Melting of Floating Ice Will Raise Sea Level
Physical experimentation
Logic
Say levels will rise
WUWT say no rise
who is correct????
————————————————–
CAGW logic. The article states that fresh water occupies 2% more then salt water does. I wonder how long do those guys think the water remains un-salted in the ocean? According to the salinity page is all mixed up between 30 and 38 (sea surface salinity)

JJThoms says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:31 am
So, unless I missed something, the experiment as described and pictorialy demonstrated in that paper showed that at that particular concentration of salt water such a large chunk of ice (large, that is, relative to the volume of salt water) will raise the water level to a certain, measurable degree. I find no flaw with that. It’s pretty straightforward. The problem is that it is in no way even close to representing the real world.
My very brief idea of the way the experiment could be greatly improved upon:
1. Take a volume of salt water that represents the water in the oceans and put it in a basin that (somehow) roughly relates to the size and shape of the ocean basins of the world (i.e. cliffs in some areas, marshes and bays in others).
2. Add crushed ice that would be representative of the amount of sea ice (the “average” volume of sea ice over the last 30 years would be a good enough guesstimate in my opinion).
3. Let the ice melt.
4. Measure the difference in the level of water in the basin.
Doing it the way I just described would at least show a more accurate representation of what would actually occur in the real world, though still not perfect. After all, the coastline is not a smooth, vertical glass wall and the varied nature of the coastal topography would allow for more or less encroachment on coastlines at specific locations, if that makes sense. To me, the experiment that was described and shown in that paper is not much better than the CO2 in a bottle experiment done by ManBearPig and Bill Nye, the PseudoScience Guy.
My guess as to the results would be that although there would be some rise, it would be negligible (probably be less than 0.01% of the normal daily tidal changes).

pat says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:05 am
Though I agree that they are way off the mark, it is also true that as it melts at one pole, it freezes at the other. Granted, that may occur at different rates and with different volumes, but whatever those rates are, I’m sure it is worse than we thought…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsWXR1_uYaM&w=560&h=315%5D

I thought Archimedes Principle said that when a body is totally or partially immersed in water, the telephone rings?

I just had a huge realization. It is normally assumed that ice on land will contribute to sea level rise when it melts because it is being supported by the land and not floating. But then I just realized that the land is not itself resting on a solid object. Under the land is a sea of lava. Therefore, by Archimedes principle, when the ice melts, the land under it will float up in the lava sea and allow the level of the lava under the ocean bed to subside, thus lowering the sea bed and sea level. Actually, the ice melt may contribute about 50% of the sea level rise you would otherwise expect, because not only will the sea bed subside but the land of the continents that was not under ice will also subside, lessening the subsidence of the sea bed and lowering the tide gauges.

Mindbuilder says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:30 am
essentially correct. it’s generally called isostatic rebound – but is usually pretty slow!

The actual rise is obviously insignificant.
WUWT title plus text is simply non scientific:
NSF just now figures out Archimedes’ buoyancy principle
Just like Archimedes discovered millennia ago, it is well known today that the Arctic ice cap displaces it’s own weight in the water so that when it melts it will not cause a rise in global sea level.
Surprisingly, the National Science Foundation has just figured this out (thanks to someone complaining about it) and has issued a correction to their sea ice page.
Sea Ice (even created from the ocean) is much less salty than sea water. The density of sea water is greater than the ice. The ice will (according to archimedes) displace its own WEIGHT. The volume of sea water displaced will be less than the VOLUME of ice displacing it. QED

@Mindbuilder
I seem to recall reading somewhere that this is precisely what happened to land masses as glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. all those land based glaciers melting should have raised the sea levels but the land that had been weighed down by all that ice rose up due to being relieved of the weight. I don’t recall whether the net result was a loss or gain in the amount of dry land though.

Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:26 am
Talking of buoyancy, as silly question for the day, with CO2′s molecular weight around 44 and the air’s 28 shouldn’t even well-mixed CO2 have a rather higher concentration near the ground?
Depends of the mixing speed where the sources and sinks are. Over the oceans, the mixing speed is larger than the speed at which the oceans release or absorb CO2, thus there is little difference between the equator and the poles over the oceans, neither from sealevel to about the stratosphere. Only huge changes like seasonal absorption and release by vegetation gives moderate differences between altitudes and latitudes. The largest differences are over land, where most point sources and fast sinks are situated. For semi-rural places, with little wind the CO2 levels increase at night and decrease during the day, when the sun starts the photosynthesis.
Here an overview of af a few days of CO2 levels at four “baseline” stations from the NH (Barrow at sealevel, Mauna Loa at 3,400 m) and the SH (Samoa at sealevel and South Pole at 3,000 m) and Giessen (Germany, semi-rural):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
The differences between near ground over land and the “background” CO2 levels are decreasing with height and wind speed. Over 500 m over land, the air is at background CO2 level, as flight measurements show:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/inversion_co2.jpg

Now if we can only get them to admit the seas have stopped rising,
even according to their biased measurements.

Aah, but the part of the ice that is sticking out of the water is farther away from the axis of the earth, and therefore subject to a greater centrifugal force, which counteracts the gravity! Therefore, the volume of water displaced by the ice IS less than the volume of the water it will turn into.
At 500 km from the north pole, this effect amounts to a fractional volume increase due to thawing of approximately 0.000,000,000,000,04.
Now, this number seems small. On the other hand, if we now use this number to calculate how much sea ice must already have melted in order to cause the sea level rise that did happen over the last decades – it turns out that it is definitely worse than we thought!

The experiment that he showed was meaningless as it is not relevant. In the Arctic the ice forms from the sea water. As it does it gives up salt into the sea. When it melts it remixes with the salt. A zero sum equation. If he had done this in his beaker you should see the level drop and then rise again as the ice melts.

@Kev-in-Uk – Slow? Unless the lava of the lava sea is so viscous as to be nearly rigid, the rebound would be immediate. That stuff coming out of volcanoes is not anywhere near that viscous. The isostatic rebound might appear slow in the area close to the melt because of the fair rigidity of the crust over short distances, but at some distance away, the effect would be immediate.
But I also realize now that the rise and fall of the lava sea would be proportionately less than the height of the ice melt due to the lava sea having a higher density than the ice and water. So, for example, if 4 meters of ice on top of Antarctica melted, and the lava sea is four times denser than the ice, then the lava sea under Antarctica would only rise 1 meter. The subsidence under the sea bed would also be proportionately less. Cut this in half again, accounting for the subsidence of the land of the continents with tide gauges not under the ice, and it doesn’t appear this effect will do much to save us from the sea level rise of melting land ice.

The maximum density of water is about 4 degrees C. Cooling water at 4 degrees causes expansion but melting it and warming it to 4 degrees C actually causes contraction. I would suspect that is the more common in the arctic melt to go from zero to maybe 4 degrees than the other way around. I doubt it gets much warmer. The tiny correction that Frank suggests is probably that melting sea ice actually lowers sea level a tiny bit but that is just an educated guess.

Hmm, this could be a bit embarrassing for the Team. I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a quick statement that they could use should they get any press inquiries:
“Archimedes is not a peer-reviewed climate scientists and therefore is unqualified on this subject. Once again, the press is reminded that not all opinions should be given equal weight. There is consensus in the peer reviewed literature that the unprecedented melting of floating ice will lead to the death of 342,786,934.3 people by June 6th, 2027. These manufactured ‘controversies’ like we see from WUWT and other denialist screeds are the result of deliberate distortions by Big Tobacco and Big Oil who seek to distract attention from the fact that variations in surface temperature have been shown to be entirely caused by humans”

Six years! It took them six years to notice that… and someone had to tell them: pathetic.
FD

BravoZulu says:
October 10, 2011 at 11:27 am
“The maximum density of water is about 4 degrees C.”
That’s correct but the maximum density of SEAwater is -2C. Unlike fresh water, salt water keeps getting denser right up to the point it freezes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Density_of_water_and_ice
he density of water is dependent on the dissolved salt content as well as the temperature of the water. Ice still floats in the oceans, otherwise they would freeze from the bottom up. However, the salt content of oceans lowers the freezing point by about 2 °C (see following paragraph for explanation) and lowers the temperature of the density maximum of water to the freezing point. This is why, in ocean water, the downward convection of colder water is not blocked by an expansion of water as it becomes colder near the freezing point.
Don’t feel bad, it’s a VERY common mistake and one I have to correct in these pages fairly often.

oops that should be “amazing how many people DO know about the strange maximum density point of fresh water” in my previous missive

Chuck Nolan says:
October 10, 2011 at 11:23 am
FrankSW says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:49 am
To be a truly scientific experiment you need to use a second control glass of ice/whiskey that is not randomly taste tested to evaluate the process of the dilution/evaporation of the alcohol. (refilling the tasted non control glass as needed to double check the mixing potential of the solution is sometimes required.)

JC says:
October 10, 2011 at 11:18 am
Right! If I had to give out the research funding, I would give it to you and no one else.

Annual sea level should also fall by 1.2 mm over the winter due to Arctic sea ice increasing. The NSF should have written:
“In addition to altering salinity, melting sea ice also raises worldwide sea levels by up to 2 mm, with potentially significant effects for coastal cities and towns.”
That would have quantified their alarmism.

mkelly says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:43 am

FrankSW says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:49 am
You can see the effect with simple experiment that can be carried out at home, just pour a gin and tonic, add ice and watch……
I have tried this experiment as stated and with other liquids. Beam, JD, Jameson, etc and I never am able to reach a conclusion as the liquid always vanishes prior to the ice fully melting. Any suggestions?

I have a suggestion. Piss on the ice cubes to fill the glass. Presumably that won’t disappear before the ice melts in the manner of the others.

The net loss of intelligence from the effort to sustain AGW is alarming.

[NOTE: That’s one millennium, two millennia. -REP, the incurably pedantic moderator]
Actually two millenniums is also acceptable. There’s no requirement in English to use Latin plurals and for some words, like insurance premiums, the Latin plural premia is quite uncommon although technically acceptable if you don’t mind readers viewing it askance.

Just a nit to pick here, but I did follow that link to the 10 things about science I should know. Unless I’m much mistaken, they are trying to tell people that the theory of relativity is actually a law.

It’s obious the warmist never take their drinks on the rocks

ola tedin says:
October 10, 2011 at 1:02 pm
It’s obvious the warmist never take their drinks on the rocks
From their results I would guess their preference would be, a can of beer just far enough below freezing so it turns to slush when opened, and the out gassing CO2 causes the resultant foam trapped in the slush to spill out over the top of the can, before they can get started on swilling it down.

Many of the commentators here seem to have forgotten that one of the most important aspects of science is replication of results. So after you’ve observed what happens to the ice in your glass of gin/scotch/JB, dispose of the contents and repeat the experiment.
After 5 or 6 replicates you should have an answer. It may not be to the question you started with, but you’ll have answer about something, or even everything!

Ice is nice enny kinda plice.
==================

I think, therefore I bathe.
==================

1. Take a volume of salt water that represents the water in the oceans and put it in a basin that (somehow) roughly relates to the size and shape of the ocean basins of the world (i.e. cliffs in some areas, marshes and bays in others).
2. Add crushed ice that would be representative of the amount of sea ice (the “average” volume of sea ice over the last 30 years would be a good enough guesstimate in my opinion).
3. Let the ice melt.
4. Measure the difference in the level of water in the basin.
It’s like throwing the ice from a cooler chest into Disney World’s “World Showcase Lagoon” and expecting to flood out the Morocco pavilion. Even ramping up the amount of ice won’t make a difference until the volume of the ice approaches a significant fraction of the volume of the body of water. The floating ice caps just aren’t that much water, compared to the oceans.

Gary Pearse says:
October 10, 2011 at 12:24 pm

You can always find the nigglers who can point to a physics experiment that says the sealevel goes up. But lets do the experiment properly and see what we get: take seawater in a beaker and measure, freeze a layer on the surface and measure, finally thaw it out again and measure. If you get rising levels this way, we can solve th world’s water problems.
You mean sea ice wasn’t plunked in by someone like the whiskey drinkers on here?

I worked with Noerdlinger a bit on his paper (though not in co-author capacity). The effect is real and can be demonstrated in lab conditions, but is not really observable in the real world because the effect is smaller than the accuracy of the instruments. The effect does happen due to sea ice, but as people point out, sea ice freezes and regrows seasonally, so only changes in the multiyear ice cover really matter. Also, there is some salt in ice, but small enough compared to the ocean to have almost a negligible effect. Seawater is ~30 parts per thousand (ppt) of salt, while sea ice is ~3 ppt, though higher for first-year ice. The largest effect though is from melting ice shelves – the floating tongues of ice coming off of glaciers and ice sheets. These have significant more mass than sea ice – though they cover less area, they’re 2 orders of magnitude thicker. Of the 4 cm effect on global mean sea level, almost all of that would come from the ice shelves. Only about 4 mm would come from the loss of sea ice. Overall a pretty small, perhaps trivial amount, compared to the projected sea level rise from thermal expansion and melting of land ice, but nonetheless an interesting result I think.
Walt Meier
NSIDC

Undeniable says:
October 10, 2011 at 2:00 pm
I wasn’t aware of that – it was always described as a supercooled liquid 30+years ago AFAIR – just googled and found this
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-fiction-glass-liquid
which at least maintains that it is not really a solid! But I was only using it as an analogy for a very slow moving liquid anyway – so hopefully, the point still stands…..

Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:October 10, 2011 at 9:26 am
“Talking of buoyancy, as silly question for the day, with CO2′s molecular weight around 44 and the air’s 28 shouldn’t even well-mixed CO2 have a rather higher concentration near the ground? I mean, the concentration profile of CO2 according to height cannot be the same as the one for oxygen, can it?”
————————————————————————-
I once worked in a lab that tested breathing apparatus for the US Navy. We had some helium/oxygen high pressure bottles that had been sitting in the lab for years. Since the density ratio of helium and oxygen is greater than nitrogen and CO2, you would expect to see separation effects sooner. When we carefully tapped the years-old bottles, we found no evidence of segregation. The normal thermal motion kept the gasses mixed.

Millions of square kilometres of arctic and antarctic sea ice melts and freezes every year and the sea level does what?

If the warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, how much does this lower the sea levels?

DavidS says:
October 10, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Millions of square kilometres of arctic and antarctic sea ice melts and freezes every year and the sea level does what?
Well, in my place the sealevel goes up and down by 5 meters, twice a day. Must be a lot of melting and freezing somewhere …

Richard says:
October 10, 2011 at 2:40 pm
@JJThoms says:
“Sea Ice (even created from the ocean) is much less salty than sea water. The density of sea water is greater than the ice. The ice will (according to archimedes) displace its own WEIGHT. The volume of sea water displaced will be less than the VOLUME of ice displacing it. QED”
JJThoms please admit that you have made an embarrassingly stupid blooper. How can the volume of ANYTHING being displaced be less than the volume of the thing displacing it?
———————————–
We call that floating. The density of the seawater being displaced is higher than the density of the sea ice so a weight of seawater equivalent to the weight of the sea ice is displaced without the entire volume of the ice submerged. The “extra” ice volume sticks up in the air, but as the ice is much denser than the air it displaces it sinks down to the level of the water. I suppose you could quibble over his usage of displacement, but I think it’s pretty clear what he meant.

JJThomas:

Sea Ice (even created from the ocean) is much less salty than sea water. The density of sea water is greater than the ice. The ice will (according to archimedes) displace its own WEIGHT. The volume of sea water displaced will be less than the VOLUME of ice displacing it. QED

I’ve bold-faced this part of your argument. It appears you believe the statement that the sea level rises is independent of a consideration of the differences in their salinity.
As I’ve said many times, the beautiful thing about words is you can get them to mean almost anything you want.
Equations aren’t so mutable.
Let’s choose a simple model: ice floating in a glass of water (assume cylindrical volumes, that is the cross-sectional areal of the glass is constant with change in height): Here are the parameters:
rho0 = density of water
A0 = cross-sectional area of glass
h0 = height of water without ice.
rho1 = density of the ice
A1 = cross-sectional area of the ice
h1 = height of the ice
Assignment:
1) Compute the change h2 in height of the water when you float the ice cube in the water.
2) Compute the change h2′ in height of water when the ice cube melts.
and most importantly,
3) try and figure out why (assuming you did your math right) h2′ = h2.
A change in height is not a generic result, as your argument seemed to suggest.
As Walt points out it’s interesting when you include salinity, you do get an effect, but it’s basically microscopic compared to other climatic effects associated with the melted ice. I would suppose the effect the melted ice on global albedo would be much more dramatic and measurable than this effect, which the NSF wisely removed from their discussion as it was, at the best, highly misleading.

JJ Thoms……. The experiment on that site is a failure…… It doesn’t emulate the real world….The guy doing this experiment by having a beaker of salt water and then introducing a lump of freshwater ice….is doing it wrong. The arctic winter doesn’t pluck ice from the beer fridge and plonk it in the arctic ocean…. It froze the water already there….
Do the experiment this way instead….Take a bowl of sea water. Put it in the freezer and freeze the top inch of water, making sure the ice doesn’t stick to the sides of the bowl….. There will be no change in the level of the water…. The salinity will go up. But when you melt the ice again… The salinity will fall to it’s original level…… Repeat it as many times as you want….. Every winter if you wish….. The water level won’t change. The ice displaces its own weight in water, no matter what salt content of the water. It’s an immutable fact.
So… When talking “floating sea ice”…. it is important to communicate that one is talking about sea ice that formed FROM THE SEAWATER….If not. You are comparing apples to icecubes.

If all of the sea ice melts, none of it evaporates, and the melted sea ice remains at -2C, the rise would be 1mm above average levels and 2mm above minimum levels.
However, the sea ice would cool the seawater, as ice cools a drink, and some of the sea ice would sublimate or evaporate during the melting process, so the total rise would be less than the 1-2mm calculated.

ChE [October 10, 2011 at 9:31 am] says:
“JJThoms – that’s land ice. Melting land ice does raise sea level. Melting sea ice doesn’t.”

Only true if it runs off into the seas. This is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, not these hair splitting microscopic differences in sea-ice salinity and displacement.
Almost all alarmism from the AGW cultists proceed from the supposition that all melted ice winds up in the sea. This is an error that absolutely dwarfs the one in the original NSF statement, and is prominent in AGW groupthink. There are five Great Lakes here in the USA that illustrate the folly of static ice-melt and sea-level calculations.
For example, this is almost always the basis of Greenland discussions, extremely sloppy ‘science’ concerning melt with no parallel calculation of water that would remain landbound in freshwater lakes. They seem to assume the island is convex, as opposed to a concave container.
A good rule of thumb is simply to believe nothing that AGW scientologists say about ice and sea-level.

In light of the 6.5 years of sleepwalking at the NSF with respect to the sea ice, sea level non-relationship, I can see that it’s time to float the Larry Hypothesis:
Belief in AGW dramatically accelerates the progression of Alzheimers disease.

Well, I’m very disappointed. We have discussed this at WUWT twice before. Has everyone forgotten so soon?
The answer is, yes, if the sea ice has almost no salt in it (as we are told it doesn’t) then the sea level will in theory rise a few milimetres if all the Arctic ice melts. Which rise of course is negligible. Then it will freeze again next winter and the sea level will drop a few mm.
I even bothered to do the expriment, because it’s easy enough. Why do we talk about theory when we can test that theory? The theory is borne out.
Here is my experiment:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2dhsbyb.jpg
How can scientists get such basic physics wrong?

Thanks for the answers about CO2’s “buoyancy”. I cannot look at all the links right now. However…if say we have O2 and CO2 molecules with the same average kinetic energy, since CO2 has more mass it would have a lower average speed,making therefore the CO2 molecules more likely to stay near the ground (the effect should be vastly enhanced where the atmosphere is thin enough to let molecules fly unimpeded for longer times).
What am I doing wrong? (question)

Werner Brozek says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:19 pm
“Steve from Rockwood says:
October 10, 2011 at 2:09 pm
3. Volume of Arctic sea ice from PIOMAS is 2.87E+04 cu km.
8. If only 2.6% displacement occurs (fresh versus salt) then 80 x 0.026 = 2.09 mm.”
You seemed to have used only Arctic ice, but Noerdlinger says:
Our total estimate for floating ice in terms of displacement is then 660,000 km3.
So it seems as if he uses total earth floating ice which is 23 times more than your Arctic ice so he gets a number 23 times larger. But is his number correct?
—————————————————————————————
Werner:
Arctic sea ice is estimated by PIOMAS to be 27,800 km3.
Mueller estimates Arctic shelf ice at 575 km2 with an average thickness of 40 m for 23,000 km3
Using sea ice + shelf ice in the Arctic only gives a total 4 mm of sea level rise – the value quoted by Walt Meier.
The 660,000 km3 must include all Antarctic sea + shelf ice.

“Steve from Rockwood says:
October 11, 2011 at 5:47 am
The 660,000 km3 must include all Antarctic sea + shelf ice.”
I quoted the following right from page 13 of their 28 page document:
“Our total estimate for floating ice in terms of displacement is then 660,000 km3.”
For some reason, I cannot get the URL, but when I google “total ocean sea ice volume”, the following is one of the things showing up:
[PDF]
Melting Sea Ice will Raise the Ocean Level
home.comcast.net/~pdnoerd/NoerdlingerBrower.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
by PD Noerdlinger – Cited by 8 – Related articles
freezes into sea ice, a similar decrease in effective ocean volume, equal to 2.6% of … explicitly or implicitly, on the assumption that the total meltwater volume …
At http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html
the following appears:
–floating ice only ~620,000 (km3)

It’s a cycle, dudes. When sea water freezes, it dumps most of its salt, slightly increasing the salinity and density of the remaining water, but also slightly increasing the volume. This is counterbalanced by the raising of some of the frozen water into the air, as it now occupies more volume than the water phase would have. So not much net change. Then, when it melts, it re-dilutes the water and all is as it was before. All in all, negligible effects all round.

re: the experiment at physorg.
I suspect that the ruler is placed backwards (if I was to do this experiment I would want my numbers to increase as water level rose and not decrease) so as we cannot know the depth of the beaker. Thus making approximation of the size of the ice cube pointless if trying to work out whether it was touching the bottom of the beaker at the start of experiment. Also is that beaker getting narrower or is that an optical illusion? Lesser minds want to know.
PS: if allowed through moderation please delete my earlier similar comment as I made dumb grammatical errors

daveburton, I get the opposite result from you.
i.e. when pure ice floating in salt water melts, the level rises slightly – as physics predicts, and as we have thrashed out twice before at WUWT. Any experiment that does not show that is wrong.
http://i43.tinypic.com/2dhsbyb.jpg
I am not considering the levels before the ice cube was created, just pure ice in sea water. The whole effect on sea level is trivial at all times, but there is a slight rise. Let us be truly scientific and agree with that. Yes of course when the ice freezes in the first place (with or without salt in it) the levels will change. The original claim stated (deceitfully) that “when [Arctic ice] melts it will not cause a rise in global sea level” and did not consider level changes when the ice first froze.

jaymam says:
October 11, 2011 at 10:09 pm
“daveburton, I get the opposite result from you.
i.e. when pure ice floating in salt water melts, the level rises slightly – as physics predicts, and as we have thrashed out twice before at WUWT. Any experiment that does not show that is wrong.”
jaymam, not sure if you read in Richards post above: October 10, 2011 at 9:29 pm
“When sea water freezes there is “brine expulsion” which is supposed to make the floating ice almost pure water. I do, however, see a recent thesis saying this is not so:” – see also the link to the paper there.
Furthermore it was mentioned that ice density varies in ice shelves where lower levels are compressed by the higher level, not sure how significant this is but could be.
If all floating ice and shelves melts it was calculated it would increase sea level with 4 cm (all floating north hemisphere floating ice would generate 2 mm). If the above 2 mentioned points are taken into account not sure if there is anything left of the 4 cm. This is more or less a theoretical discussion as true as the one: when we all go to bath in the sea in summer sea level are rising with 4 microns.

I thought that WUWT discussions had already settled this matter. Why do we bother having complex theoretical discussions at WUWT when we can’t even agree on one of the earliest scientific experiments, that of Archimedes?
Unlike the climate alarmists, I’m not prepared to use misleading facts to try to win an argument.
Please note well, I am ONLY talking about a lab experiment where pure ice melts when it is floating in sea water. I and others contend that the level of water rises slightly when the ice melts, and that physics predicts that, and that that physics is not wrong.
Granted that the sea level sank when the ice froze so there is no nett difference.
Granted that if the icebergs are as salty as the sea water there will be no change in sea level when they melt. Please let’s not revisit all that.
Granted that if Professor Andrew Shepherd’s worst fears happen and the sea level rises by 49 micrometers every year, after 20 years the sea level will have risen by 1mm, that’s
one whole millimetre. (How will we tell?)
It doesn’t matter whether or not Arctic ice freezes with salt in it or not, because we are talking about a simple experiment that you can all do at home. Please all do it and let us know your results. I’m redoing the experiment with sea water, not that the amount of salt actually matters since it’s a principle that we are discussing here.
And please read the earlier discussion where I thought we agreed that yes the level does rise when pure ice melts, particularly wayne’s comments:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/30/climate-craziness-of-the-week-msm-jumps-on-alarming-headline/#comments
wayne says:
May 1, 2010 at 8:28 am
…
“You know, when I first read this article this morning I was saying the same thing you are saying. Archimedes wrong in this case, poppy cock! But I love physics and I just had to test this out. These are the weird things that make physics enjoyable and fascinating.
So I went to wiki and got the densities of ice, water, and sea-water. Set up a thought experiment with 10x10x10 cm cube beaker (1000 ml) with a 500 cm3 (or ml) cube of ice in it and then fill it to the brim with sea-water. Get that in your mind. The ice sticks ~10% above the rim of the beaker of coarse.
The rest is rather easy to calculate, but I will be darned, he is correct. The volume of the melted ice, even though it sticks out of the beaker will be larger than the “hole” that the floating ice creates and occupies in the sea water. Amazing. I spent a good bit of today checking and double checking the calculations. I kept coming up with 2.5%, not 2.6% difference. Close enough.
Now that’s interesting to me. If he’s right (and now me), and it appears it is so, and it’s proper physics, then he deserves at least a nod for his honesty and foresight. Here is some unexpected science. We have seen so many things coming out of the AGW camp that are blatantly distorted, manufactured, and manipulated in science and physics that is hard to believe that any thing coming out from that side is true. But this one does appear so.
But put it in perspective, I also calculated base on that 2.5-2.6% difference and the effect is TINY. As I stated above, ALL of sea ice in the entire world if melted at once would only raise the oceans 7 millimeters, not centimeters. That’s about the width of a pencil or the diameter of a pea. If you were standing at sea level the rise would barely cover the soles of your shoes. Now that’s comical! How do you make a scare story from that?
But if your interested in a quirk about Archimedes principle, here are the three densities to compute it yourself, 0.9167 for ice, 1.0 for water, and 1.025 for sea water all in g/ml (same as g/cm3). The key is the volumes, not the mass that does this since water expands when frozen and salt water is ~2.5% denser than water, so Archimedes was still right all along, he was only measuring mass.”

I have redone the experiment with pure ice in actual seawater from the bay outside my house, and the increase in level is so small that it’s hard to measure, which appears to be what daveburton discovered.
I have again redone the experiment with pure ice in water with much more salt dissolved in it, and there is a definite rise in level when the ice melts.
It is difficult to get ice without bubbles of air in it, and the melting ice blocks keep getting in the way of the meniscus of the water level being measured. I think a physicist should do the experiment with proper laboratory equipment, and explain the physics of the rise,
e.g. stating the volumes of the water and ice at all stages of the melt.
I suggest starting with 1000 ml of pure water and add 1000 g of pure ice. The level should stay at 2000 ml throughout the melting.
Then start with 1000 ml of concentrated brine and add 1000 g of pure ice, and the level should change from say an initial 1950 ml and end up at 2000 ml when the ice has melted. The ice of course floats higher in the brine than in the water.
I will say yet again that I am ONLY discussing whether or not there is a rise in level during this experiment. I maintain that any competent physicist would say there *is* a rise. Therefore the statements at the top of this article are not strictly correct. Is WUWT going to bother getting science right or are we not going to worry about that? If our science is wrong, that will allow the warmists to attack us as being unscientific.
There is no doubt that the level of salt water rises when floating pure ice melts. So the statement “melting sea ice also raises worldwide sea levels” is strictly correct if some sea ice has lower salinity than seawater, although everybody seems to be in agreement that the rise is trivial. A scientist would say that a “trivial rise” is not the same as “no rise”.
The statement ” with POTENTIALLY SIGNIFICANT effects for coastal cities and towns” is of course completely wrong and needed to be changed. I don’t think anybody has disputed that.