Reply #12: The Great Lakes are hundreds of feet above current sea level

[caraher]

The lowest, Lake Ontario, is something like 240 feet above sea level; I'm not sure that melting every drop of natural ice on Earth would bring sea level up that much. Turning the Great Lakes into salty inland seas - well, we'll have already had much bigger problems well before it gets to that stage!

But this does raise an interesting definitional question - sea level had always been the standard reference for elevation. As oceans rise, will we redefine the "height" of sea level, or will we keep the pre-warming sea level as the standard?