Idea:

A friend and I were discussing how great it would be to have a beach here in Vegas, if the ice caps were to melt..
But he brought up the idea of a glass of water with an icecube in it. The bouyancy would cause the water level to rise, and if it were to melt, the water level would be just as it was, except without the icecube, it would have just added to the water..
I'm a bit skeptical, because I thought that they were connected somehow, through land in Antartica and about North Canada..
Can anyone clear up this little ramble?

- Drax

Ice caps melt, the oceans don't rise all that much. They displace exactly as much water as the consist.

hmmm, interesting

You guys are forgetting to include a shiot load of variables, the biggest one being that a glass of water and a planet are 2 completely differnet things, the water level over the entire earth is not level. Gravity pulls things inward, so all the water around the world would be affected a little differently according to the tempuratures and physical landscape of the the different sections of our planet. If the ice caps were to melt, the water level would rise significantly, this has ben proven already.

um actually i htink the levels would go down becuace when water freezes it displaces more than it contains. In other words water expands when it freezes so if the caps melt there would be less water than volume of the ice.

the arctic ice caps melting would have little effect on sea level because, as has been said, they are floating and alreayd displacing water. But if the antarctic ice melted, sea levels would rise because antarctic ice is actually on land, so it isnt displacing water right now. I think it's that way round :\

well if D was still around i would tell him