The remark about ice, water level and condensation has been... has been... shall we say "largely uninformed." Using an example of ice melting and condensation forming on a drinking cup is a very poor attempt to explain a very complex issue.
And, that's too sad.
What hasn't been accounted for is the story of Noah and a global flood. Mix in with it the theories about Pangea, separation of the shelfs, and a shifting of the tectonic plates, and you've got a really interesting upheaval of unparalleled proportion, on a magnitude that makes the San Francisco earthquake, the tsunami in Thailand and ever other cataclysmic event COMBINED! pale by comparison. In other words, we're talking about a massive upheaval which would have made mountains.
Everyone ought to know and understand some basic fundamentals about hydrogeology, chemistry and physics. However, most don't and most won't.
Even the reference to "the physics involved" fails to account for very important variable... environmental water vapor. For example, why does flooding occur if a fixed amount of water is in the environment?
Let's examine just one issue: condensation.
Water and its vapor are everywhere! Especially in the South in the summer! Why, if the Almighty hadn't invented air conditioning, in the South, we'd be done for!
Simply put, condensation occurs when two surfaces with different temperatures contact each other.
The condensate comes from water vapor in the environment, which is called humidity.
We see the phenomenon with contrails, or the condensation trails of jets in the skies. If you've ever flown a small aircraft, you know that even on the hottest summer day, it's freezing cold up in sky and in those clouds. It's also much less dense.
The hot exhaust gasses cause water vapor in the upper atmosphere to condense around the area of heat. What has happened, is that heat has 'driven away' water vapor from other areas, thus causing it to concentrate. When it cools, it concentrates.
Think of it this way: Examine the condensation around an air conditioning coil. In the concept of air conditioning, moisture is removed from the air, and cooled moisture-free air is blown back in.
The reason contrails form is because the area with the cooler temperature has a greater capacity to hold more water vapor at a particular temperature and pressure than does the warmer area. Watch contrails sometime. The longer they stick around, typically means a higher concentration of atmospheric water vapor. Inversely, the quicker they dissipate, the less likely it it to rain. (The fact that in select heavy air traffic corridors, contrails can increase cloud cover up to 20% is concerning.) As the air temperature rises, the point at which clouds (and contrails) form increases along with the vapor pressure.
The concepts to understand in that process include Dew Point, Relative Humidity and environmental pressure made by atmospheric water, also sometimes called vapor pressure. Barometric pressure is also important.
Simply put again, the Dew Point is that point where evaporation ability and condensation ability equal each other.
Though the discussion could get more technical, suffice it to say that the greater an object's ability to resist temperature change (also called insulation power) the less condensation will occur on it. Although, at some point, at a given temperature, humidity and pressure level, condensation will occur.
In the natural environment, we call that "rain."
Here's a three-hour GOES-8 movie that shows the proliferation of contrails.
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/wxwise/class/CONTRL.mpg
A GOES-8 movie of the contrail left 12 November 1995 launch of STS-74 (Space Shuttle Atlantis).
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/wxwise/class/Shuttle.mpg
Here ends lesson one.