so how long would it take for all the sea water to move around once the ice caps and glaciers melt after all the global warming and what would happen to it.

well here’s your answer!

Twenty inches per decade — that’s the estimate of how rapidly the oceans rose in the last interglacial period about 121,000 years ago, in research appearing in Nature. That’s eight feet over 50 years, in a world just 2°C warmer than we are today.

Not good.

But one little detail bugs me: while we can make educated guesses as to what triggered the sea level increase (glacial melts, presumably), there’s no way of knowing from the fossil evidence when that trigger happened. That is, how long between the prehistoric Antarctic ice sheet collapse (for example) and the resulting surge of ocean water actually making it to the rest of the world?

It turns out that, due to some major currents and the sheer mass of the ocean, dumping megatons of ice (or rock, or whatever) into one part of the sea doesn’t make the whole world’s sea level pop up immediately. It will, eventually, but it takes time, potentially decades — or even centuries.