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All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)

753 pointsby tigerlily9 months ago

70 comments

dredmorbius9 months ago
NB: The infographic and articles are based on a 1993 publication.<p>More recent research, from about 2017, suggests that there&#x27;s about as much water in Earth&#x27;s mantle as in all the oceans, so we either need another drop roughly the volume of the first, or the second drop should be greatly expanded.<p>See: &quot;There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans&quot; (2017) &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2133963-theres-as-much-water-in-earths-mantle-as-in-all-the-oceans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2133963-theres-as-much-...</a>&gt;<p>The USGS is citing a 1993 publication, Igor Shiklomanov&#x27;s chapter &quot;World fresh water resources&quot; in Peter H. Gleick (editor), Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World&#x27;s Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York) (see the detail links from the submitted article).<p>That said, water remains a precious resource, and fresh surface water all the more so.<p><i>Edit:</i> &#x2F;double the size&#x2F;s&#x2F;size&#x2F;volume&#x2F; above, for clarity.
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sfink9 months ago
I long assumed that the Earth is a &quot;water planet&quot; because water is mostly what you see from a distance. It wasn&#x27;t until I did the math that I realized that is really about wet rocks in space vs dry rocks in space.<p>Earth isn&#x27;t made of water, it&#x27;s just a damp rock. Or a bowling ball that you squirted a dozen times with a spray bottle.
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alluro29 months ago
I don&#x27;t really follow a lot of comments questioning the choice of shape, methodology, exclusion of water in the mantle etc.<p>I believe the purpose of the image is to evoke sense of preciousness and responsibility towards the water we have - maybe how much for granted we take our &quot;blue planet&quot;.<p>To me, this is an amazingly effective and visually poignant way of doing just that.
umvi9 months ago
&gt; This sphere includes all of the water in the oceans, ice caps, lakes, rivers, groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.<p>Does it include water in the mantle? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bnl.gov&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news.php?a=111648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bnl.gov&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news.php?a=111648</a>)<p>or other non-liquid water for that matter like hydrates (ebsom salts, etc)
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kevinkeller9 months ago
Largest ocean in our solar system isn&#x27;t even on Earth, apparently:<p>&gt; ... Ganymede’s ocean is even bigger than Europa’s—and might be the largest in the entire solar system. “The Ganymede ocean is believed to contain more water than the Europan one,” he says. “Six times more water in Ganymede’s ocean than in Earth&#x27;s ocean, and three times more than Europa.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;overlooked-ocean-worlds-fill-the-outer-solar-system&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;overlooked-ocean-...</a>
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openrisk9 months ago
If you could squeeze the Earth&#x27;s atmosphere into a ball of similar density it would be more or less of size of the middle sphere (all the oceans only weigh 270 times as much as the atmosphere [1]).<p>So there you have it: the key ingredients all life depends on are but a tiny boundary layer of water and air, stretched thinly between solid rock and the hostile emptiness of outer space.<p>The grand challenge of our sustainability is, indeed, how much can we (humans) perturb this extraordinary complex boundary layer without inducing runaway dynamics that we (or rather, future generations of us) will not particularly like.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencefocus.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;how-much-does-earths-atmosphere-weigh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencefocus.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;how-much-does-earths-at...</a>
myself2489 months ago
Turn Randall Munroe loose on this idea and be prepared for unspeakable devastation as a tsunami of Lovecraftian proportions wreaks havoc on the planet...
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rmah9 months ago
Just a few quick calculations to make it more relatable...<p>They say the smallest sphere of freshwater lakes and rivers amounts to 93,113 cu km. There are 1 bil cu m per cu km. With a global population of 8.2 bil people, that comes to 11,355 cu m per person. That&#x27;s a 22.5 meter wide&#x2F;deep&#x2F;tall cube (or about 7 or 8 stories tall building).<p>If we use the sphere that includes groundwater, 10,633,450 cu km. Then we end up with 1,296,762 cu m or a 109m wide cube per person.
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mistercow9 months ago
I think it’s important to keep in mind that if you did this same visualization on a planet with ten times Earth’s radius, but the same ocean depth and water distribution, then the water blobs would seem even smaller in comparison to the planet.<p>I’m just not sure it’s a particularly useful illustration to compare the volume of water on a planet to that of the planet itself.
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andrewstuart9 months ago
Sounds like the water moon from Iain M Banks &quot;The Algebraist&quot;, quote:<p><i>&quot;I was born on a water moon.<p>Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometers in diameter &#x27;moon&#x27; seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just water, all the way down to the very center of the globe.<p>If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one&#x27;s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very center of the moon.<p>Where a strange thing happened.<p>For here, at the very center of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon, or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its center; once at its center one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of the water that the moon was made up from.&quot;</i>
CodeWriter239 months ago
I think this is kind of useless information unless presented with other spheres for humans, structures, animals, plants, forests etc. for comparison. And ants.
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jrflowers9 months ago
Fun fact: If you did this, everyone would die.
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enriquto9 months ago
It would be nice to see the &quot;carbon&quot; version of this infography. How much carbon is in the atmosphere as CO_2, in the biosphere as part of living stuff, and buried kilometers underground as gas and oil. Also, how much of that carbon we are pumping per year from underground to the atmosphere+biosphere system, and vice-versa.
Sparkyte9 months ago
Not sure this is accurate as we&#x27;ve discovered that water can reside deeper in the Earth than previously imagined and in addition to that the density of water at the surface is different than at the bottom of the ocean. I suppose they are also accounting for the salt being removed too. But my argument is probably in the margin of error so what do I know?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technology.org&#x2F;how-and-why&#x2F;what-would-happen-if-we-brought-water-from-the-deepest-ocean-to-the-surface-in-a-sealed-container&#x2F;#:~:text=And%20if%20you%20took%20a,the%20time%20of%20sample%20collection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technology.org&#x2F;how-and-why&#x2F;what-would-happen-if-...</a>.<p>So I feel like the USGS is exagerated.
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sahmeepee9 months ago
This is similar to the idea that if you scaled the Earth to the size of a standard size 5 football and dried it off, you would barely be able to feel the mountains or trenches on the surface. The water is therefore a very thin film over the land in those terms.
rob7cc9 months ago
The water spheres look small but here&#x27;s a fun back-of-the-envelope computation. The article states there is 22.3k mi^3 of water in lakes and rivers. One person in the USA (a high consumer) consumes 82 gallons of water every day (source: epa.gov) which is 7.4E-11 mi^3. Let&#x27;s say each person does this for a long-lived 100 years, giving 7.4E-9 mi^3 per lifetime. So the 22.3k mi^3 of lake and river water can support 3 trillion lifetimes. That&#x27;s not including the much larger amounts of ground water and ocean water. Those &quot;small spheres&quot; are huge!
mensetmanusman9 months ago
Can’t help but want to build that.<p>Apparently all the mined gold in the world would fit inside a 5 m diameter sphere.<p>Spheres are suspicious in hiding weight.
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eh_why_not9 months ago
I was curious how much of this water we lose to space via evaporation. Looking around, apparently not much; only few molecules achieve escape velocity. But can&#x27;t find a good calculation yet.
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frabjoused9 months ago
Pertinent video that came out 4 hours ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q</a>
rishikeshs9 months ago
Does this include the water in all human made stuff like pools, tanks, etc and also water present in all organisms? Or is that negligible?
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2f0ja9 months ago
Reminds me of the short story &#x27;Sea of Dreams&#x27;[1] by Liu Cixin. It&#x27;s in one of his anthologies but I can&#x27;t remember which one<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;61305943-sea-of-dreams" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;61305943-sea-of-dreams</a>
bamboozled9 months ago
Helps one understand why pollution is such an insidious problem.
Electricniko9 months ago
&quot;in a single sphere&quot;---- shows three spheres
tamimio9 months ago
I would like to have a zoomed-in picture of that &#x27;tiny&#x27; freshwater lakes and rivers to see its height. From this perspective, it doesn’t add up. Just above it, the Great Lakes look far bigger, not to mention other lakes and rivers in the world.
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mckravchyk9 months ago
When you look at the image you can&#x27;t help but think how it would look like if a giant ball of water was dropped like this on the surface. Apart from the flood &#x2F; water destroying &#x2F; reshaping the surface of the entire continent, anyone has an idea how it would the impact look like?<p>I am probably way off, but I imagine solid ice sinking deep into the ground with water starting to turn into vapor in the upper layers and the vapor generated inside exploding out from the ball as it gradually shrinks and deforms.
bell-cot9 months ago
IIR, the Earth&#x27;s mantle is understood to contain several times the total water content of the oceans, glaciers, lakes, etc.<p>Obviously that water would be somewhat less accessible and quantifiable, but...<p>Anyone familiar with the current geoscience on this?
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rising-sky9 months ago
Pretty interesting juxtaposition considering water makes up about 71% of the Earth&#x27;s surface, while the other 29% consists of continents and islands!
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jongjong9 months ago
I think that part of what is surprising is that our brains cannot comprehend the scale of earth so we see the photo as a model of earth and wonder how it&#x27;s possible that so little water can spread throughout. At model scale, the water wouldn&#x27;t spread all the way around the globe because of viscosity and surface tension.
cromulent9 months ago
The volume of humans is approximately 500B liters [1] and this would make a sphere just under 1km in diameter.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input?i=volume+of+all+humans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input?i=volume+of+all+humans</a>
nashashmi9 months ago
Spheres could be a more viable unit of measurement instead of &quot;Millions of Gallons&quot;.<p>Imagine the headline:<p><pre><code> 500 million gallons of water expected to melt this year </code></pre> VS<p><pre><code> 1.2 microspheres of seawater expected to melt this year</code></pre>
gorgoiler9 months ago
As an aside, the smallest ball is a few hours travel by bicycle, or two days on foot. Planet Earth is large, but it brought home how it is not so large. I would have guessed that 35 miles was a lot smaller than is shown.
srameshc9 months ago
We always talk about how scarce freshwater is but this image reprenstation has made it difficult to imagine how much supply do we have for an ever growing human population, the growing demand for water and how long will it last.
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jzl9 months ago
I think this may have borrowed liberally from Corridor Crew’s video about the same topic earlier in 2019: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;b3_Abb2Vqnc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;b3_Abb2Vqnc</a>
moffkalast9 months ago
Anyone remember that Voyager episode where they find this exact thing floating in space, held together by some kind of gravity generator? The plot was forgettable but the concept was super interesting.
utkarsh8589 months ago
What a coincidence, One hour before reading this article I was thinking of it! I was imagining that how the sphere will look like if made of oceans and seas&#x27; water. Now I got to know it :D
mattmaroon9 months ago
Anyone see this and think “holy crap we better scale up desalination?”
Turneyboy9 months ago
Ok I don&#x27;t mean to be pedanntic but a sphere is just the boundary of a ball. If we are trying to capture volume we should be talking about balls of water.
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jumploops9 months ago
Let&#x27;s find a large ice comet and direct it towards Mars!
andrei-akopian9 months ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b3_Abb2Vqnc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b3_Abb2Vqnc</a>
Aperocky9 months ago
That&#x27;s actually a lot bigger than I thought - The largest asteroid Ceres would be 1&#x2F;3 the diameter of this water sphere (860mi)<p>That&#x27;s a LOT of water.
webprofusion9 months ago
So what we&#x27;re saying is, if there was less water then I could have really big back yard. Things may get a little crispy though.
ck29 months ago
also related they now believe earth&#x27;s water is older than the sun by finding a similar pattern around another star<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;science&#x2F;earth-scientists-orion-water-alma-b2296663.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;science&#x2F;earth-scientists-...</a>
itohihiyt9 months ago
This freaks me out, and I have no idea why...
m3kw99 months ago
The height of the sphere isn’t easy to visualize, should over lay height of water over Americas area
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nemo44x9 months ago
It&#x27;s about 554.4 trillion Olympic-sized swimming pools, if you&#x27;re interested.
tomcam9 months ago
I’ve alerted all my friends in Kentucky. That thing could blow any time.
snowfresco9 months ago
Wow, imagine all the data centers you could cool with all that water
geepytee9 months ago
Does this include the water inside of living creatures?
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yogurtboy9 months ago
I honestly find this extremely unsettling. There should definitely be more, though I don&#x27;t really want our planet to look like Kamino
100pctremote9 months ago
IIRC water in earth&#x27;s mantle is magnitudes greater than the volume contained in our oceans. I think only part of Earth&#x27;s H2O story is illustrated by this graphic.
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veunes9 months ago
I don&#x27;t know why, but it scares me
divbzero9 months ago
Similarly, all of the gold we have mined could form a cube measuring 22 meters on each side [1] and would fit comfortably within a baseball infield [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualcapitalist.com&#x2F;sp&#x2F;chart-how-much-gold-is-in-the-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualcapitalist.com&#x2F;sp&#x2F;chart-how-much-gold-is-i...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.berkshirehathaway.com&#x2F;letters&#x2F;2011ltr.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.berkshirehathaway.com&#x2F;letters&#x2F;2011ltr.pdf</a> (p. 19)
danielodievich9 months ago
An xkcd Drain the Oceans <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what-if.xkcd.com&#x2F;53&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;what-if.xkcd.com&#x2F;53&#x2F;</a> is highly entertaining on this vein.
veryfancy9 months ago
Conspicuously near the Great Lakes (NA)
Gravityloss9 months ago
See, the water amount isn&#x27;t <i>that</i> large. What if we crashed some comets that are mostly ice to Mars? Modern technology makes it easy to calculate some order of magnitude effects like what would be the average water coverage increase of Mars if Halley&#x27;s comet (assuming it was completely water) was crashed there: 3 mm.<p>Calculation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input?i=%28halley%27s+comet+volume%29%2F%28mars+surface+area%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input?i=%28halley%27s+comet+vol...</a>
insane_dreamer9 months ago
Shouldn’t this say “surface water”?
brcmthrowaway9 months ago
Jordan Peelems next movie, FLOAT
RIMR9 months ago
I&#x27;m sold. Let&#x27;s do it!
fallat9 months ago
How do we make more water
Smudo9 months ago
i want to se a Fluid simulation of this drop with an earth model
utopcell9 months ago
Yeah, but also if you took all humanity and compressed it into a &quot;meat sphere&quot;, it would only be 1km wide [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iflscience.com&#x2F;blended-up-every-living-human-in-the-world-would-make-a-meatball-just-three-eiffel-towers-wide-63963" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iflscience.com&#x2F;blended-up-every-living-human-in-...</a>
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TheRealPomax9 months ago
The problem with this sphere is that people are terrible at understanding the mind boggling scale represented by &quot;height&quot; here. It looks like a tiny drop that &quot;fits on the US&quot;. Instead it has a diameter of 860 miles. That&#x27;s a ball of water that reaches all the way to outer space...<p>...and then keeps going for another 800 miles.
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raldi9 months ago
Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
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aranaur9 months ago
Do oil next!
PaulHoule9 months ago
... it&#x27;s about as much water as this place<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ceres_(dwarf_planet)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ceres_(dwarf_planet)</a>
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abtinf9 months ago
2019
wrp9 months ago
&quot;Consider a spherical ocean...&quot;
bozhark9 months ago
&quot;All the Earth&#x27;s FRESH Water&quot;
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downboots9 months ago
Wouldn&#x27;t a cube be a better choice for visualizing volume? A more complete version would do it alongside with minerals, biomass, etc
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mikewarot9 months ago
It looks too small, perhaps there&#x27;s more water tied up in the core and mantle than that?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bnl.gov&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news.php?a=111648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bnl.gov&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news.php?a=111648</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;water-in-earth-core-forms-crystal-layer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;water-in-earth-core-forms-crystal-laye...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de&#x2F;125691203&#x2F;An_ocean_inside_the_Earth__Water_hundreds_of_kilometres_down" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de&#x2F;125691203&#x2F;An_ocea...</a>