Here's what Earth will look like if all its ice melts

If all the ice blanketing Earth were to disappear, it would bring about a massive disorder on the planet. The melting of ice sheets won’t just trigger a mass extinction event, but a gradual and total collapse of life. This rapid melting may not always look like cracking rocks, spilling dams, or dripping cave stalactites, as depicted in Ice Age: The Meltdown. Demonstrating a visual of how this global warming impact will look in the years to come, Business Insider shared a YouTube clip in 2015, which has since garnered over 24 million views. The animation brilliantly illustrates how Earth’s belly may soon be welling with water, the same way Pluto’s heart is frozen with ice.

“We learned last year that many of the effects of climate change are irreversible. Sea levels have been rising at a greater rate year after year, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates they could rise by another meter or more by the end of this century,” Insider wrote in the video description. They pointed out that this climate change is prompted mainly by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels. Ice is crucial to sustain life on Earth. The polar ice caps not only keep the Earth cool, but they reflect as much as 70% of sunlight into space, even more than the oceans.

But, as the veil of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide fumes spreads throughout the icy terrains of Greenland and the Antarctic, it heats enormous patches of ice, provoking a cascade of radiating fissures. The heat stirring up causes the protective coating of glacial ice to slowly give itself away into meltwater. This causes the sea levels to rise. A 2021 timelapse video showed that ice is melting at a dreadful rate of 3.6 mm per year. “If the current rate of warming continues,” Google Earth explained, “sea level rise will put more than 800 people at risk by 2050.” Plus, according to Scientific American, Earth has lost 28 trillion tons of ice since the mid-1990s. NASA also explains that as meltwater sloshes toward the equator, it will slow down Earth's spin.

The animation by Insider zooms into a 3D Earth, and demonstrates how and when the cities will start to vanish as the cloak of meltwater floods the land. The impact starts with Australian territories like Queensland and low-lying areas like Venice. As the globe rotated, cities like Barcelona and Lisbon disappeared under the water. The animation showed how even the bigger cities like Mumbai and Calcutta were beginning to lose their places on the map, which was rapidly turning blue.

Then came the turn of Japan’s Tokyo and Chinese regions of Bangkok, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Golden brown pieces of land continued disappearing in the blue background including those belonging to the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. The impact stretched to Houston, New Orleans, Havana, Miami, and ultimately to Washington DC. Florida will say goodbye too. But at least its residents are aware already, after Hurricane Milton, of what it’s like to evacuate and leave their homes as meltwater floods the streets.