The answers to [this question][1] say that the sea level will rise 66m if all the polar ice, etc, melts. How long will this take? Transporting incredible amounts of heat energy to the poles and injecting it into the ice, a good insulator, so that it melts must be very, very slow. The Netherlands, London, and all the rest will be long gone for other reasons, I imagine, long before it could be completed. I am looking for an order of magnitude minimum under which it is provably impossible for the ice to all melt any faster. Wild and crazy assumptions are welcome, so long as they err on the side of making the ice melt faster than it would in reality - that way the estimate will always be a minimum. [1]: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/608/357