Monday, May 7, 2012

How Much Water is On Earth?

This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.






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4 comments:

  1. Now that's a little scary right there.

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  2. I think it's scary because it's without any other perspective. I mean, yeah, it's a tiny amount of water, but how big a ball would you get if you added up all the plants? All the people or all the bugs? And so on. At that scale, all of life is just a tiny little layer on the surface. We are "third rock from the sun" - most of it's rock an most of that is either damned hot or molten all the way down.

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  3. I'm calling bullshit on that. The insinuation is a bit general to begin with. One potential misconception here is that the volume of H2O is somewhat smaller than the volume of the planet. The problem with that theory is that life only exists on the surface of the planet, not the volume of it. Do that math, and get back to me!

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  4. @ Sarthurk... I found this link to the USGS...http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

    for what its worth :)

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