A Neat Result on Sea Level Rise

Here is a nice result: a sudden polar meltwater input of 100,000 m³/sec -- say, from a broken ice dam, or just a huge amount of sustained, extreme melting -- would, in about a week, cause sea level to rise everywhere across the globe, at an average rate of 9 mm/yr.

Here is the computed spread of water across the globe after 5 days (left) and 6 days (right):

and a temporal view:

The authors say this amount of melting is the equivalent of 3,150 Gt/yr of ice melt; recent ice loss from Greenland is about 179 Gt/yr.

The Missoula Floods that created the Washington (state) Scablands were estimated to be 9 cubic miles an hour, which is 10 million m³/sec, or 100 times the rate in this paper.

By way of comparison, the average discharge from the Mississippi River is 17,000 m³/sec;
from the Amazon River, 209,000 m3/sec;
from all rivers worldwide about 1 million m³/sec (= 1 Sverdrup).

It takes about 55 days seconds for 100,000 m³ of water to fall over Niagara Falls (both falls).

The volume of one of the World Trade Center towers was 1.7 million m³;
the volume of the interior of the New Orleans Superdome is 3.5 million m³.

(Lorbacher et al, JGR-Oceans, 2012)