I don’t know that the author proved the hypothesis, but i am willing to entertain the possibility that the most common myth of all might contain the memory of historical truth. There were certainly plenty of people around 11,700 years ago, and it seems that a lot of valuable real estate got swallowed up rather quickly.

Interestingly enough, Plato dated the sinking of Atlantis to 9600 BC.

And if we’re still telling the story of severe climate change after close to 12,000 years, i have to assume that we’d rather not live through something similar.

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I’ve already asked the author for a copy to review and write on.

As for the water lubricant effect, there are scientists who looking into that specifically as a possible cause for the rapid acceleration of Greenland glaciers over the last 15 years or so. The hypothesis is that surface temperatures melt enough of the surface to create small lakes called moulins that eventually drain down an ice crevasse and then lubricate the bottom of the glacier.

Scientists are also becoming pretty certain that warm ocean temperatures are getting under floating ice shelves and reducing the mass of the shelf that holds back the glaciers. In addition, where glaciers drain into the ocean but are grounded (ie not floating, but resting on what would be seabottom if the glacier wasn’t there), scientists think that warm ocean water is melting the ice/ground interface and speeding the retreat of the glacier’s “grounding point” toward the source of the glacier. And finally, in some cases, scientists think that warm water may be actually melting the grounded glacier and making it lose enough mass that it actually starts to float, essentially eliminating the friction between the seafloor and the glacier, enabling a much faster flow of that glacier.

As for distorting the earth’s crust, this is actually a well known effect. All of North America is slowly rising and has been since the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted at the end of the last ice age, and it’s called “post-glacial rebound” or “isostatic rebound.” I wrote about an interesting case of this in Alaska in this Carbo.

Have you done much reading on paleoclimatology? The little bit that i’ve done (and it was in relation to another subject rather than a scientific investigation for the sake of science) suggests that melt-offs didn’t happen gradually but that the gradual was punctuated by rather extreme events. I’ve got some small-scale, experimental (if anecdotal) evidence that backs up that argument:

When snow pack builds up on a greenhouse, it holds itself in place and builds up to impressive sizes (and weights). A rise in temperature causes melting on the lowest levels before the upper level melts at all. That creates a thin layer of water beneath the pack. This situation can go on for quite some time with no noticeable difference in the pack. And very many hundreds of pounds of snow pack can be held in place by a few inches of crust.

When those few inches of crust break, all holy hell breaks loose…and poor me is often knocked 15 feet through the air off a ladder (if i’m lucky) or buried up to my shoulders in the fallen pack. As best as i can tell, that thin layer of water acts as a very good lubricant for the falling pack.

So my thought/fear is that what we’ll be confronted with is not slowly eroding glaciers dripping into the sea to raise sea levels over a long(ish) time line, but that the slow drip will punctuated by hundreds of thousands of tons of ice. I’m looking at the red areas on the map, and to me they look like the bottom edge of a snow covered greenhouse dripping from underneath. And to me, that looks like the danger zone.

As a side note, some of my reading suggests that ice pack is capable of distorting the Earth’s crust (same as it does with a greenhouse roof…even a rigid roof). If a big chunk breaks off, the underlying structure responds and is likely push even more off. Again, this has happened to me on a small scale where a little bit of prodding releases an entire roof as the first break-off makes the roof bounce up and cracks the structural integrity of the snow pack as a whole.