Suppose we disregard the destruction of civilization and the biosphere; have the south pole point directly at the sun 24hrs a day.
How long until all the snow and ice melts?
Yeaaaah, baby. Groovy question.
Hey. You aren’t planning anything extreme, are you Dr. Evil?
-Austin
OK, believe it or not, this CAN be calculated! By knowing the thickness of the ice, ambient temp (lets assume some constant T is reached), and some constant wind speed, let’s say 0 mph, it can be calculated!
One technique is to assume the mass of ice is one lump. This is known as a lump sum approach. I know this assumption is made to find the time it would take for the core temp of a frozen turkey to reach 350 F! Also, recently in Baltimore, a jeweler placed a diamond in ice displayed at the State Fair. Whoever came closest to how long it would take for the ice to melt would win the diamond. This is also a lump sum problem.
Before I go pull out the formula to answer this, I will state it involves math functions you’ve probably never heard of. It involves, IIRC, either the phi-psi function or the erffunction. (I believe the erf function is for cooling fins radiating heat.
Do you still wish to see some formulas?
- Jinx
Jinx here! …Just wanted to add that the lump sum assumption is valid for sphere-like objects, like a turkey or a block of ice, both of which may be approximated in this fashion. For the ice at the South Pole, I am sure there is a similar technique for what would be catergorized under “thick plates”.
Lastly, when I speak of an ambient, constant temp…I refer to the air temp baove the ice. We’d have to assume (after tipping the globe) that the region has reached some steady-state temp…just to simplify the problem a bit. And, a wind speed of 0mph was chosen to give you the worse case scenario solution as to how long it would take to melt the South Pole.
Once we have the theoretical solution, we can then put our evil plan to tip the globe into action! Yes, we’ll put the South Pole where the Tropics are!!! 
- Jinx
About 50 million years when the sun becomes a red giant and switches to He fusion. If you got the south pole facing the sun, the North pole is going to get pretty darn chilly. Ice there should never melt, just keep piling on till the oceans around the south pole are gone.
Uh, if the south pole is facing the sun in the way you imply then day is infinitely long on one side, and night is equally long on the other side. So the concept of “24hrs a day” when there is no night means…aw heck, I don’t know what it would mean.
I was just pulling your leg. The answer is 18 months, 4 days.
Barring a never ending ice age, about 220 million years.
Thats how long it took for antartica landmass to geologically migrate to its present position and ice up. Previous to that it was sub-tropical. Give its present rate of movement, it should take the same amount of time to be free of ice.
BTW, if you can instantly shift the position of antartica to constantly face the sun, I would think that the details to polar meltdown would be trivial.
Yes, this is whai I mean.
I figure, with the sun beating down on the south pole continuously, it would quickly get as hot as noon at the equator.
100F deg. for months=?
Well, rotating the Earth to a configuration where the South Pole points directly at the sun would definitely involve a psi phi function! [sub](If you don’t get it, pronounce the Greek letters with the long-I sound.)[/sub]
A related question: Supposing the Antarctic ice to be completely melted, what is the net result in terms of new coastlines. I know it raises sea level something like a hundred meters – but what will that mean in terms of shapes of current land masses?
It would get far above 100F if the sun were continuously beating down on it. Think of a desert with no night. Summer high temperatures in a desert can reach 140F at the surface. Based on my observations of melting snow and glacier melt during summer (I’m not joking here), I would guess that it would take decades. Huge chunks of ice would break off early on. But unlike the Arctic, there is landmass underneath the Antarctic Ice that can’t break off and float away, but the depth and volume of ice is really huge. Land projecting out, such as mountains, would have a high heat absorption that would accelerate melt there, and I would guess that temperatures would spike upwards. But the reflectivity of the ice would protect it for a while. Since North America would be in permanent darkness, we’d be frozen solid. Gosh, now I’m worried. Will I be able to sleep at night now?