• Question: How long will it be before all the ice caps melt?

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      Asked by BRAINBOY34 to Cat?, Elaine, Helena, Iain, Gabriel on 8 Mar 2016.
      • Photo: Helena Quilter

        Helena Quilter answered on 8 Mar 2016:

        I hope that won’t ever happen! There are lots of people working hard to try and stop that happening. There are lots of scientists studying it and trying to come up with ways to slow down how quickly the planet warms up. There was also a meeting last year of lots of world leaders (like our Prime Minister) where they promised to make lots of changes to stop any more warming – hopefully that will make a difference and we won’t ever see all the ice caps melting!

      • Photo: Cat Scott ?

        Cat Scott ? answered on 13 Mar 2016:

        Hi BRAINBOY34,

        We don’t expect *all* the ice to melt anytime soon. If all the ice (all the glaciers, ice sheets, icebergs) in the world melted, we would expect the sea level to rise by about 50 metres (that’s a lot!) – which would be very bad – but at the moment we do not expect climate change to melt all the ice.

        There are many different types of ice on the planet, there are big glaciers ?, ice that covers the land (like in Greenland) and ice that floats on the sea
        These all behave a bit differently so there are different kinds of scientists to study each type of ice!

        We think that all of the types of ice are shrinking, for example we think that the ice floating on the sea at the North Pole was shrinking by about 4% every 10 years since the 1980s. At that rate it would take at least 200 years for it all to melt – but we need to stop climate change before it gets anywhere close to all melting.

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