What will happen to earth if the artic and antartic ice totally melts. What is the impact to society ?

People who live a few blocks from the beach will suddenly have waterfront property.

I will buy land in Alaska and raise Pineapples and Bananas.

lots of really flooded coastal cities.

We would all be crunched into the highest ground because it would flood a ton of the Earth. If EVERY glacier, body of ice, etc. melted, the Earth would literally flood.

We'll all turn into dolphin yetis in order to adapt to the new conditions through rapid evolution.

A few people who reported the fact that is not likely to happen because even during the Roman Optimum and Medieval optimum when it got a lot warmer than it has so far sea levels were not much different than they are now. Why, because 80% or more of both ice caps are already floating and displacing their mass of water. What ice is on land even if it all melted would only raise sea levels about ten feet at the most. Why, because most of the ice on land in the Antarctic and Greenland is in a big sink with mountains all around it. Plus the weight of the ice causes the land to sink and the sea floor to rise displacing water. Even if all the water got to the ocean the rebound of the land under the ice cap would cause the land to rise in altitude, the sea bed would then sink and there would be very little change in overall sea level. The 300 to 500 foot rise in sea level occurred some 11,000 years ago at the end of the last great ice age and caused the flood documented in the bible and other places in historical documents. Please people read “The Ends of the Earth” and “A Choice of Catastrophes” by Isaac Asimov. These documents tell the scientific truth with much documentation to support them and frankly make the religious nuts promoting climate change look dumber than they really are.

Your premise would cause oceans to rise several hundred feet-- however Antarctic ice is expanding at the current time.... and Arctic ice which is ocean ice and mostly NOT over dry land-- refreezes every year, and has no affect on ocean levels.

Most of the continent's icy mass has so far proven largely impervious to climate change, being situated on solid rock; its deep interior is actually growing in volume.However, Antarctica's periphery has been noticeably affected by global warming, particularly on the Antarctic Peninsula and in Pine Island Bay which together are contributing to a rise in sea levels. In 2003 the Larsen-B ice shelf collapsed owing to global warming. According to NASA, the most significant Antarctic melting in the past 30 years occurred in 2005, when a mass of ice comparable in size to California briefly melted and refroze; this may have resulted from temperatures rising to as high as 5 °C (41 °F). Also, although having no obvious effect on the continent's environment, there is a large ozone hole over Antarctica which was detected by scientists in 1973 and continues to grow to this day. The main cause is the emission of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs into the atmosphere, which decompose the ozone into other gasses. For more on the ozone hole, see Ozone depletion. A bridge made of ice based on the Leonardo da Vinci draft plans for a bridge over the Golden Horn in Istanbul was built in Antarctica in 2007. This project was a plea to the world to stop the causes of global warming in the hope that the "Leonardo Bridge" in Antarctica remains standing forever. (A similar ice bridge had been constructed in the garden of United Nations on 15 December 2007 for the purpose of demonstrating global warming. That bridge melted fully on Christmas Day 2007.)[citation needed] On February 28 through March 8, 2008, about 570 square kilometers of ice from the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Western Antarctica suddenly collapsed, putting the remaining 15,000 square kilometers of the ice shelf at risk. The ice is being held back by a "thread" of ice about 6 km wide. The polar ice pack is thinning, and there is a seasonal hole in ozone layer in many years. Reduction of the area of Arctic sea ice will have an effect on the planet's albedo, thus possibly affecting global warming within a positive feedback mechanism.Many scientists are presently concerned that warming temperatures in the Arctic may cause large amounts of fresh meltwater to enter the North Atlantic, possibly disrupting global ocean current patterns. Potentially severe changes in the Earth's climate might then ensue. Other environmental concerns relate to the radioactive contamination of the Arctic Ocean from, for example, Russian radioactive waste dumpsites in the Kara Sea and Cold War nuclear test sites such as Novaya Zemlya

"A one-meter sea level rise would wreak particular havoc on the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard of the United States. 'No one will be free from this,' said Overpeck, whose maps show that every U.S. East Coast city from Boston to Miami would be swamped." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0420_040420_earthday_2.html Greenland Melt May Swamp LA, Other Cities http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0408_040408_greenlandicemelt.html By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction.html "(Atmospheric CO2 concentrations at) 550 ppm would lead to the greatest disaster ever experienced by human civilization -- returning us to temperatures last seen when sea levels were some 80 feet higher." http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/31/14256/031 "Antarctica stores enough ice to raise ocean levels by about 57 metres if it ever all melted. Greenland has about 7 metres, according to UN data." http://www.truthout.org/article/sea-rise-outpacing-predictions-due-antarctica Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he's worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs "in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars." http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/news/NationalPost.html Melting glaciers will trigger food shortages http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13519-melting-glaciers-will-trigger-food-shortages.html "The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia," says Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. The Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in India and China are fed by rains during the monsoon season, but during the dry season they depend heavily on meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas. The Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas alone supplies 70% of the flow of the Ganges in the dry season. The dry season is precisely when water is needed most to irrigate the rice and wheat crops on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their staple calories. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year that many Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.