Bagheera wrote:Indeed. But, let's leave the axial tilt bit aside -- gaffes show up every now and then, and it's not crucial to the plot anyway, so best to just sideline it and move on. Let's think about the rest, and how we might reconcile all of it. First, the destruction of Antarctica. What does that mean, exactly? I mean, I talked above about an explosion that annihilated the landmass, but is that all it can be? The Antarctica we know is just a sheet of ice, really; if that ice is melted Antarctica is effectively destroyed, even though the landmass is relatively untouched. And we know from ep 21' that it was really hot around the research area. What if, once the Anti-ATF was deployed, that heat encompassed most of the continent, such that the ice (relatively) quickly melted? The landmass underneath would eventually rise to the surface, but that would take quite a long time -- I'm not sure how long, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took decades, or even centuries. So, as of 2015, it's possible Antarctica is still there, but is mostly underwater. And if it's underwater ships can easily sail above it, and voila! Script integrity is maintained and we don't have to deal with a planetary disaster.
TraxXavier wrote:to melt all 30 million km3 ice on the antarctic, one would need 4.52e+26 J i.e. 108 billion megatons TNT
...
to put it into perspective, the earth gets 8.64e+24 J of energy from the sun per year,
now I'm wondering it that makes sense, it would mean that we would need the total energy of the sunn for 52 years to melt the south pool down completely.
Yea given the antarctic ice sheet is hundreds of thousands years old that is plausible....
Or lets say it different: 2 million tons of Antimatter.
nope, nope, nope, just nope... no angel or whatever is ever going to generate this much energy.
I'm quite sure man kind could never survive a energy release on earth at this magnitude. So really melting down the antarctic ice sheet in only a few minutes or even hours is not going to happen, without killing everything else on earth.
Also iirc. the antarctic land mass is not below sea level so if one would melt all the ice you will just end up with a continent.