Here’s the Terrifying Way the Earth Would Look Like If All the Ice Melted Away

Scientific evidence echoes the dire reality that our planet is speeding towards a dangerous future due to the frightening rate at which ice is melting, even amid the noise created by those who deny climate change. As the US presidential elections in 2024 loom closely, climate change is a volatile subject.

Global ice loss has dramatically increased, according to a 2021 study, rising from 760 billion tons yearly in the 1990s to an astounding 1.2 trillion tons annually in the 2010s. An equally concerning finding comes from a NASA-funded study on the Greenland ice sheet, which shows that 74 large glaciers are severely undercutting and weakening, which would culminate in horrifying rises in sea levels. Between the dire crisis of climate change, one often wonders: what could happen if the ice caps end up completely melting? What will happen to coastal areas, or iconic cities like Venice?

"It's like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body," Eric Rignot, a glacier researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine, who also co-authored the study, told The Washington Post. "You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body. I think this is an example that the current projections are conservative. As we peer below we realize these feedbacks are kicking in faster than we thought."

The NASA-backed research suggests that the international scientific community may be underestimating the impending sea-level increase, even if the first study supports the IPCC's worst-case projections for sea-level rise.

When one considers a National Geographic visualization effort from a few years ago, the weight of these discoveries becomes evident. The initiative, which involves global experts, envisions a dystopian situation in which all of Earth's ice melts completely. Based on National Geographic's estimates, a Business Insider video documents what the Earth would look like in a nightmarish future where the ice caps have melted.

Rising sea levels will destroy iconic cities of Europe like Brussels and Venice, as well as metropolises in Asia and Africa, uprooting millions of people. Cities in South America like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires will probably disappear under the waters as well, and the United States would suffer a terrible fate. The whole state of Florida, along with Houston, San Francisco, and New York City, would be on the verge of submerging under the ocean. 

"This would not happen overnight, but the mind-boggling point is that our actions today are changing the face of planet Earth as we know it and will continue to do so for tens of thousands of years to come," the lead author of the study Ricarda Winkelmann explained as he suggested what one can do to avoid this dire future. "If we want to avoid Antarctica to become ice-free, we need to keep coal, gas, and oil in the ground."