Here's how big a rock you'd have to drop into the ocean to see the rise in sea level happening now

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Politics Analysis

Here’s how big a rock you’d have to drop into the ocean to see the rise in sea level happening now

By Philip Bump May 17 at 4:05 PM [link:[e-mail]|Email the author]

During a hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on Wednesday, Rep Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) pressed Philip Duffy, president of Woods Hole Research Center, to identify reasons that sea levels might be rising.
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Brooks has a vision in his head like the classic experiment by Archimedes, in which the scientist sank down into his bath and noticed the water overflow — providing a way to determine the volume of his body. But the amount of water displaced by even a giant boulder falling into the ocean is not like a body going into a bathtub. It is, as Duffy said, minuscule. ... Certainly 3.3 millimeters doesn’t sound like a lot of water to displace, and it does seem, to Brooks’s point, that it’s an amount — about 0.1 inch — that would be easy to displace with a cliff collapse near San Diego. The equivalent rise relative to surface area in an Olympic-sized swimming pool would be 0.0000000000114 millimeters. That’s not possible, though, since a water molecule isn’t that small.

But when you apply 3.3 millimeters of rise to the entire ocean? We’re talking about a lot of water that’s displaced — 3.3 millimeters across about 362 million square kilometers of surface area. The total volume displaced, then, would be 1.19 trillion cubic meters of water. ... We know from Archimedes’ work that the amount of earth required to displace that much water is the same volume: 1.19 trillion cubic meters. Here’s a corny video by a science teacher showing how it works.

So to make the oceans rise 3.3 millimeters, we would need to displace that 1.2 trillion cubic meters of water upward by dropping in 1.2 trillion cubic meters of dirt or stone or whatever. ... How much is that? It’s a sphere of earth a bit over 8 miles in diameter. If we were to balance it at the top of the Capitol building, it would look like this.



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Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire. Follow @pbump

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Very clever and interesting! Thank you. K&R. n/t