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On this water world we live on, only a small fraction is frozen—about 2 percent. But even that small amount of ice can be devastating if it melts. If all of the ice sheets melted in Greenland and Antarctica, world sea levels would rise over 200 feet, causing widespread coastal flooding. A lot of media attention is focused on the Arctic ice, especially because so much of it melts during the summer. As the ice melts, it exposes the darker open water. This darker water soaks up much more solar heat than the white and reflective sea ice. Absorbed heat turns up the thermostat on the planet, making the problem increasingly worse.  Because of the important role it plays in preventing further warming of the oceans, Arctic ice is, for good reason, a matter of great concern to scientists. But did you know that even if all the ice in the Arctic Ocean melted, sea levels wouldn’t rise at all? This is because the ice on top of the sea is already part of the ocean, displacing its own weight in liquid water. As it melts, the total amount of water in the ocean doesn’t change, so the levels stay constant. You might be a bit suspicious about this, but you can do a simple experiment in your kitchen to prove it. Take a glass, and fill it most of the way with water. Drop an ice cube in it, and then slowly top off the glass with tap water, taking care not to let it overflow. Watch as the ice melts. You’ll notice that the water level won’t change, and your glass won’t overflow. The ice floating in the ocean behaves the same as your ice cube, remaining part of the sea, but not adding to the total volume. The more direct danger to the millions of people living on coastlines around the world is land-based ice. When that ice melts, much of the water released runs off into the ocean, raising the total amount of seawater. Greenland alone has enough frozen water sitting on it to increase global sea levels by 20 feet. If Antarctica, with an ice sheet covering more area than the US and Mexico, melts, sea levels will jump 200 feet! (To see what even a small rise of up to 6 feet would do, check out this interactive tool provided by NOAA that lets you dial in your own amount of coastal flooding.) In the glass-and-water simulation, melting land ice would be like holding an ice cube in a sieve over a full glass, and waiting for the ice to melt. If you let it drip through the sieve into the water below, the glass will slowly overflow, flooding your counter. An interesting note: sea ice generally doesn’t raise sea levels, but scientists are still concerned that widespread melting of certain kinds of sea ice will indirectly cause sea level problems. In the large bays of the Antarctic continent, large expanses of ice, like the Ross Ice Shelf float on the Southern Ocean, silently guard coastlines half a world away. How do they do this? By holding back the land glaciers, ice shelves slow their advance to the sea. When the ice shelves collapse or melt, the land glaciers accelerate their downhill flow, dumping loads of liquid water and icebergs and raising sea levels. This graphic from the National Snow & Ice Data Center illustrates the problem quite clearly:

[Image: "Graphen" by AlexanderAlUS - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graphen.jpg#/media/File:Graphen.jpg]

Dear Readers,

Hi! I’m Yi, and I’m the Founder and Executive Director of SciNote. I, along with the other SciNote Directors, would love to have the opportunity to meet you all a little more personally and talk to you a bit more about the “big picture” of SciNote-- what we do, and why we do it. That’s why we made this video for you, and we hope that, if you have a spare minute, you’ll watch this video and let us know what you think about what we aim to do!

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We’re currently in the process of putting together our first issue of SciNote magazine, showcasing all of the work we’ve done in our first year, to be published this October. In fact, October 2015 is a super big month for us-- we will also be establishing our first Observatory in Rwanda. We’re also designing and producing our very own SciKits, so that they’ll be ready to ship in October, along with instructional videos and a Chromebook, to the students waiting at our partner schools around the world.

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We have a variety of cool perks for all of our donors, including copies of SciNote magazine, SciKits, and even the chance to choose and name an Observatory! Check out all of the perks and read about the rest of our campaign at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/SciNote.

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Hey there, SciNote reader!

           Do you want to become a member of the SciNote team and help us bring science to readers like you? Well, now is your chance! SciNote is looking for interested, enthusiastic individuals to join our Editorial Staff. So if you love thinking about sentences as much as you love reading about science, this could be just the position for you. As an Editor, you will be responsible for reviewing posts written by our writing staff (Discoverers, Experts, Writers) and making sure that they are ready to be published here on Tumblr and on scinote.org/blog. It will be your job to work with our writing staff to make sure that content is clear, precise, and accessible before it is posted to our blog  – all while letting each writer’s unique approach and voice shine through your edits.

           The ideal applicant would have some background both in science and in editing or writing, along with a clear enthusiasm for communicating science to a general audience. I have a bunch of editing experience but not much of a science background, I hear you saying. Can I still apply? Of course you can! Working with language will be your primary responsibility. What if I’m a scientist that hasn’t done very much editing[/writing], but I love science and want to help tell the world about it? If you noticed that I should have said “who” instead of “that” in the last sentence, you should stop worrying and start applying.

           Interested applicants should go to http://www.scinote.org/staff-application.html. The application will involve downloading a sample draft so that you can show us what kinds of edits that you would make to it. If this is a problem, or if you have any other questions about the position, feel free to email us at [email protected].

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Tomorrow at 7 pm EST, get ready to read about the science behind one of Death Valley's most fascinating phenomena! In the meantime, however, we're collecting questions! If you've ever wondered about anything in science-- whether it be how paint dries, or if animals are conscious, or how in the world computer memory works-- that's what we're here for! Ask our Seeking SciNote Experts here, and we'll get back to you (and all the other people wondering the same thing) as soon as we can.

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