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

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-sphere

by tigerlily • 2 years ago

753 275 2 years ago

usgs.gov

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

... it's about as much water as this place

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

It would use up roughly the same volume, but it'd be a lot more water.

(Much heavier, I suspect, as well.)

rachofsunshine7• 2 years ago

Much lighter, actually. Ceres isn't particularly dense as rocky bodies go (~2.2 g/cm^3, give or take), but it's still much denser than water (~1 g/cm^3).

drewg123• 2 years ago

So, crash Ceres into Mars, and we have made a huge step towards terraforming?

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

Ceres could be taken apart with solar energy and rebuilt into a habitat much bigger than the Earth, never mind Mars. Ceres leads to the stars, Mars is just a dead end.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

The height of the sphere isn’t easy to visualize, should over lay height of water over Americas area

g15jv2dp• 2 years ago

It's a sphere, the height is equal to the diameter that you plainly see on the picture.

mecsred• 2 years ago

I'm trying to visualize the amount of water here, but it's hopeless unless an elementary student can calculate how many oil drums it would fill or football fields it would cover to a depth of one yard.

didgetmaster2• 2 years ago

The beauty of a sphere is that ANY dimension is EVERY dimension! Height, length, width, depth, etc. are all the same.

rachofsunshine7• 2 years ago

Assuming you mean "the depth of this water, if confined to a cross-sectional area the size of the United States", this is one of those nice Fermi estimation problems:

- I know the US contains hundreds of millions of people, and the world contains a single-digit number of billions. So the US has about 10% of the world's people.

- The US probably isn't particularly dense or sparse relative to other populated areas, so 1/10 the population should be 1/10 the Earth's land area.

- The Earth has twice as much ocean as land, and

- The ocean is a few miles deep - let's say 5 - so there's about 10 miles of ocean depth per land area.

- So compressing that to 1/10th the land area suggests the oceans should cover the US to a depth of about 100 miles.

The exact answer, it turns out, is about 89 miles - really close, without looking up a single piece of information!

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28332%2C500%2C000+cubi...

didgetmaster2• 2 years ago

I believe the US has about 350 million people out of about 7 billion people on Earth. That makes the US population equal to about 5% of the total, not 10%.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Can’t help but want to build that.

Apparently all the mined gold in the world would fit inside a 5 m diameter sphere.

Spheres are suspicious in hiding weight.

guhidalg• 2 years ago

I've heard something like this before, but 5m is too small. The gold council reckons it's a little larger than that: https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold

nightpool• 2 years ago

The World Gold Council says:

If every single ounce of this gold were placed next to each other, the resulting cube of pure gold would only measure around 22 metres on each side

So that can't possibly be right, you must be off by a factor of 10 or so at least—Wolfram Alpha says a 30m diameter sphere.

vesinisa2• 2 years ago

27 meter diameter in fact. A 27-meter sphere is about 150 times as voluminous as a 5-meter sphere.

It's still a mind bogglingly small amount considering that humans have spared no toil, sweat and blood on industrial scale gold mining ever since the dawn of written history - and since gold is so valuable and hard to destroy, most of it should still exist to this day in form or another.

Yet, if you smelted it all to a single object it would fit on a typical single family housing plot.

dylan6047• 2 years ago

Spheres/circles are definitely surprising in how a seemingly small increase in radius changes the volume/area much more drastically. The cubing/squaring exponent is easily taken for granted.

yzydserd• 2 years ago

I thought it was an Olympic sized swimming pool.

vesinisa2• 2 years ago

Close. About four of them, or a single 40-track one (the standard one has 10 tracks/lanes.)

downboots• 2 years ago

Wouldn't a cube be a better choice for visualizing volume? A more complete version would do it alongside with minerals, biomass, etc

mulhoon• 2 years ago

Why?

margalabargala4• 2 years ago

Humans are notoriously terrible about estimating volumes when things are curved and volume functions are exponential.

A great example of this done in 8th grade science classes across the US is to put 100ml of water in a 100ml graduated cylinder, 150ml in a 1L beaker, and ask the class which has more. Humans are awful at estimating how much volume the increased radius adds, and usually will say the 100ml.

The problem only gets worse as we graduate from cylinders to spheres.

We can all visually see which sphere is bigger, but cannot come close to estimating how much bigger one is than another.

fny• 2 years ago

They're comparing the sphere of water to the Earth which is a sphere.

Also it's by the Water Science School, so it doesn't seem your definition of completeness was the intention.

dylan6047• 2 years ago

Spheres are much more efficient. You must not have had the soap bubble question in an interview! Not everything in life conveniently fits in a box.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

IIR, the Earth's mantle is understood to contain several times the total water content of the oceans, glaciers, lakes, etc.

Obviously that water would be somewhat less accessible and quantifiable, but...

Anyone familiar with the current geoscience on this?

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240719>

geepytee• 2 years ago

Does this include the water inside of living creatures?

bowmessage• 2 years ago

Yes, from TFA:

and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.

umvi2• 2 years ago

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.

Does it include water in the mantle? (https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=111648)

or other non-liquid water for that matter like hydrates (ebsom salts, etc)

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

No, it doesn't. It 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.

FredPret• 2 years ago

"Groundwater" is a little ambiguous - H2O in the mantle is also "ground water", no?

stcredzero• 2 years ago

The sphere for all liquid water seems to be close in size to the asteroid Ceres.

https://lightsinthedark.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ceres...

dylan6047• 2 years ago

But would this sphere of water have enough mass to hold itself together as a sphere in space? Put aside it freezing into a ball of ice as a thought exercise.

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

Yep, it's quite misleading since the region where they looked for water at all is an incredibly thin layer on the outside of the planet, but they show it all as if it applied to all of the volume.

DiggyJohnson2• 2 years ago

There’s nothing wrong with their representation. You’re describing a different comparison.

Sparkyte5• 2 years ago

Same question I've got, but I imagine USGS is only considering reachable surface, atmospheric water.

Pat_Murph• 2 years ago

The wording of the legend description says all the war in, on and above the earth so we have to assume that is does take it into account.

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

Sources say otherwise, see my immediate prior comment.

YVoyiatzis• 2 years ago

Water dissolving and removing There is water at the bottom of the ocean

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

Given that the quantity of water in the mantle is thought to be equivalent to that in all the oceans (large drop), I'd presume not.

The mantle-water research is fairly new, with this report from 2017:

"There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans"

<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133963-theres-as-much-...>

The USGS detail pages are based on a 1993 publication, Igor Shiklomanov's chapter "World fresh water resources" in Peter H. Gleick (editor), Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).

<https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...> and <https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...>

myself248• 2 years 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...

maushu• 2 years ago

He already did it with a 1km diameter ball (https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/) and the destruction was terrifying. Please keep him away from these other bigger water balls.

dylan6047• 2 years ago

It was just a friendly game of water balloons. We had no intent of destroying your planet.

jameshart2• 2 years ago

Literally just posted today: the video version of his What If? analysis of what would happen if you took that ball of water and dropped it on Mars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q

CodeWriter23• 2 years 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.

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

And Olympic sized pools.

yardstick• 2 years ago

This was my first thought too.

I had no idea where to start. ChatGPT had a rather impressive looking “proof of work” that put all living humans into a 976m-diameter sphere, compared to the ~1384km-diameter sphere. Ie ~1km human sphere and 1,384km water sphere.

Zobat• 2 years ago

Wolfram Alpha had "us" making a 966 m sphere.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=estimated+total+volume+...

Which has a link that gives us the radius.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4.73%C3%9710%5E8+cubic+...

rmah• 2 years ago

Just a few quick calculations to make it more relatable...

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's a 22.5 meter wide/deep/tall cube (or about 7 or 8 stories tall building).

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.

akira2501• 2 years ago

Also.. the largest sphere has a radius of about 92 miles. It reaches to the edge of the atmosphere, and about 1/3 of the way to low earth orbit.

laweijfmvo• 2 years ago

The largest sphere represents all of Earth's water. Its diameter is about 860 miles

Should be a radius of 430 miles, no?

The image is very non-intuitive, IMO, because it's making the water appear so small compared to the entire planet (which, duh, obviously the water is only part of earth), but also drawing the planet that small really hides how friggin big the earth is!

mmooss• 2 years ago

I thought the border with space is generally (and arbitrarily) said to be the Kármán Line, at 100 km / 62.1 mi. I'm not nitpicking, just curious about other definitions.

Also, I thought LEO typically begins around 180 km / 112 mi.

madcaptenor• 2 years ago

I'm having trouble picturing a 22.5 meter cube. So consider a 200 sq m house; with ceilings of 2.5 m that's 500 cu m. So "your" water fills 22 houses.

morepork3• 2 years ago

It's interesting to consider that there's about 26,000,000 km^3 of ice in the Antarctic ice sheet, which would give you a much larger ~150 m^3 cube of ice per person. That's not including the Greenland ice sheet or any sea ice.

kevinkeller• 2 years ago

Largest ocean in our solar system isn't even on Earth, apparently:

... 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's ocean, and three times more than Europa.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overlooked-ocean-...

teekert• 2 years ago

https://www.businessinsider.nl/earth-water-ice-volume-versus...

Ganymede vs. Earth is indeed very surprising!

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

Ganymede’s ocean is even bigger than Europa’s

Europa Clipper launches in October [1]. I've seen talk of crashing it into Ganymede to give JUICE novel data [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper

[2] https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-might-crash-into-ganyme...

Sparkyte5• 2 years ago

We could probably terraform Mars if we crashed Europa into Mars.

staplers• 2 years ago

Might have some "slight" orbital and shrapnel repercussions..

wildzzz• 2 years ago

And then we completely skew Mars's orbit until it crashes into the sun or is flung out of the solar system.

ianburrell2• 2 years ago

It would make Mars warmer. It would melt all the ice and CO2. It would give Mars an ocean. Of liquid rock. This is assuming that it doesn't destroy Mars completely. There might be enough fragments to make Solar System dangerous place and destroy life on Earth.

Europa is the size of our Moon. Colliding it with Mars would be similar to the collision that formed our Moon.

hoseja2• 2 years ago

If we could crash Europa into Mars we'd have capability to terraform Mars in a more reasonable manner.

keepamovin2• 2 years ago

And then wait 160 million years for the planet to settle. I like your long term thinking.

mkl2• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/gkZ20

divbzero2• 2 years ago

Ganymede having an ocean surprised me given that its surface appears rocky in photos. Apparently, it’s an internal ocean hidden under the surface.

Lautzi• 2 years ago

The largest ocean in the solar system actually is on Jupiter [1]. The gas planet has an absolute massive amount of liquid hydrogen on its "surface". But yeah, liquid hydrogen isn't water, so it might be the biggest ocean, but not the biggest ocean made out of water in our solar system :).

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/jupiter-facts/ (Under "Structure")

jzl• 2 years ago

I think this may have borrowed liberally from Corridor Crew’s video about the same topic earlier in 2019: https://youtu.be/b3_Abb2Vqnc

Smudo• 2 years ago

i want to se a Fluid simulation of this drop with an earth model

rising-sky3• 2 years ago

Pretty interesting juxtaposition considering water makes up about 71% of the Earth's surface, while the other 29% consists of continents and islands!

digging3• 2 years ago

Well, spill a glass of water on your kitchen counter and you'll find it suddenly makes up a large percentage of the counter's surface as well!

rising-sky3• 2 years ago

I'm aware, notice my comment specifically states "the Earth's *surface* " not just "the Earth". However, my kitchen counter is a flat surface, it's common knowledge the Earth isn't flat and the average ocean depth is 3,682 meters

yogurtboy• 2 years ago

I honestly find this extremely unsettling. There should definitely be more, though I don't really want our planet to look like Kamino

sfink6• 2 years ago

I long assumed that the Earth is a "water planet" because water is mostly what you see from a distance. It wasn't until I did the math that I realized that is really about wet rocks in space vs dry rocks in space.

Earth isn't made of water, it's just a damp rock. Or a bowling ball that you squirted a dozen times with a spray bottle.

spencerchubb• 2 years ago

damp rock

lol it's funny when you put it that way

oorza• 2 years ago

Closer to a bowling ball that picked up a drop of beer from your hands.

nwiswell• 2 years ago

This didn't sound right, so I did the math.

The volume of all water is 1,386,000,000 km^3, which is then 1.386e+21 liters, or right about the same number of kilograms.

The mass of Earth is about 5.972e+24 kg. So the percent fraction by mass is 0.0232%.

A "drop" is typically estimated at 1/20th of one mL, which is then 0.05 grams. We can estimate the mass of a small-ish bowling ball at 5kg, or 5000 grams. 0.05 / 5000 * 100 = 0.001%.

So it's an order of magnitude shy, but that's still closer than I expected! It's about 1 ml of beer on a bowling ball - a small splash. Or maybe a very large drop.

ars2• 2 years ago

Earth isn't even really a "rock", it's mostly a ball of iron.

It's a ball of iron covered with rocks (i.e. metal oxides) cover with water (i.e. hydrogen oxide).

zamadatix• 2 years ago

I don't buy it. Even allowing counting iron as separate from what rocks can be composed of (and using mass instead of volume) you still have 30.1%+15.1%=45.2% of the Earth as oxygen and silicon (which are most certainly part of what makes a rock) at which point you've already disproved the claim Earth is more a ball of iron than a ball of rock.

A ball of iron covered with a ball of rocks is a more fair statement though, and I'd agree with that. It's just that center ball isn't most of what makes up the Earth (by any measure).

Intralexical• 2 years ago

"Squirt with a spray bottle" is a nice euphemism for throwing asteroids at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth#Aster...

stavros• 2 years ago

They mean in terms of the ratio of water to rock.

RIMR2• 2 years ago

The ballpark math is easy to do in your head too. The diameter of Earth is 8,000 miles, and the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, is only 7 miles deep. It's immediately apparent that the oceans are tiny by comparison to the rest of the mass that is Earth.

aspectmin• 2 years ago

An interesting exercise is to do this exact same calculation with the atmosphere.

tejohnso• 2 years ago

Neil DeGrasse Tyson says the earth scaled down to the size of a billiard ball would be smoother than any billiard ball ever made.

netsharc• 2 years ago

Earth isn't made of water, it's just a damp rock. Or a bowling ball that you squirted a dozen times with a spray bottle.

Yeah, the image with the oceans being dry is wow-inducing... On further thought, of course it'd be very close a sphere, because gravity forces it to be. A sphere where e.g. a slice of it is water (imagine a clementine with one of its segments being water) would be very wobbly if even possible at all..

hughesjj• 2 years ago

Yup, the mere fact that we can have oceans and continents on a planet means we can only have so much water, lest we become a water world or something more like mars.

I do wonder if the OP includes water locked away in rocks though, to my understanding the majority of the water is in the mantle and not even the oceans, but my source is my butt for that one

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

There are moons out there that are more like giant snowballs - so much water that it dwarfs even our reserves.

DaoVeles• 2 years ago

There was an old sci-fi trope that the reason aliens attack earth is to get at our water.

The problem with that was, 1. there are better sources of water (the oort cloud) and 2. they aren't stuck in an gravity well.

kristianpaul• 2 years ago

rock that moves and is hot inside so a magnetic fields generates from its motion and protect us from the sun particles

hoseja2• 2 years ago

It is quite incredible that there is just enough water for a continuous ocean and also dry land, not either just a couple ponds or a waterworld.

Kaibeezy• 2 years ago

Oceanus's ocean tosses with slow, tall waves, beneath a pale blue sky. The colonists live in tall cities of steel and concrete with buildings sealed against the planet's harsh environment, on platforms floating on the planet-wide ocean. They spend their time pursuing art, leisure, and spiritual fulfilment, while automatic machines take care of their material needs.

keepamovin2• 2 years ago

Mars is the same, right? Just the water is locked 20 - 200km beneath the surface from recent discoveries.

veunes3• 2 years ago

This water is locked away in the form of ice

veunes3• 2 years ago

It's true that while water covers about 71% of Earth's surface, it's just a thin layer compared to the planet's overall volume.

zuminator• 2 years ago

Even so, it's still a pretty substantial amount. Larger than Ceres, for example.

rmbyrro• 2 years ago

I long assumed

Understandably, since, in this case, surface area is more intuitively captured by our brains than volume.

Also because we are very small. The amount of water, from our perspective, makes it look like a water planet.

bozhark• 2 years ago

"All the Earth's FRESH Water"

losvedir• 2 years ago

Nope. That's the small (not barely visible tiny) ball.

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

"all of Earth's water, Earth's liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers"

Sparkyte5• 2 years ago

Not sure this is accurate as we'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?

https://www.technology.org/how-and-why/what-would-happen-if-....

So I feel like the USGS is exagerated.

rachofsunshine7• 2 years ago

The density of water at the bottom of the ocean is actually quite similar to the density on the surface; it differs by only a few percent. Gases compress proportionally to pressure, but liquids act more similar to solids and compress very little even under enormous pressures.

The oceans are only about 3.5% salt by weight, so that doesn't make a huge difference, either.

Sparkyte5• 2 years ago

I figured it would be within 5% margin.

I find this pretty interesting, https://phys.org/news/2023-11-reveal-earth-surface-penetrate...

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Spheres could be a more viable unit of measurement instead of "Millions of Gallons".

Imagine the headline:

  500 million gallons of water expected to melt this year

  1.2 microspheres of seawater expected to melt this year

frabjoused• 2 years ago

Pertinent video that came out 4 hours ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q

raldi• 2 years ago

Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?

hrunt• 2 years ago

Underground

autophagian• 2 years ago

Groundwater, and swamp water, the post explains.

schmichael• 2 years ago

The blue sphere over Kentucky represents the world's liquid fresh water (groundwater, lakes, swamp water, and rivers).

So the medium blue sphere includes groundwater and swamp water while the tiny dot does not.

comboy• 2 years ago

Groundwater mostly, but also clouds (minuscule amount).

jrflowers• 2 years ago

Fun fact: If you did this, everyone would die.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Plus every other nation on the earth would be mad at the US for taking it all

morepork3• 2 years ago

Outside of Hawaii and maybe Alaska, everywhere in the US would be devastated by the ensuing flood

jameshart2• 2 years ago

Except for the Dutch. https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

itohihiyt• 2 years ago

This freaks me out, and I have no idea why...

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

It's about 554.4 trillion Olympic-sized swimming pools, if you're interested.

srameshc• 2 years 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.

asadm• 2 years ago

Does water leave earth when used?

morepork3• 2 years ago

Only tiny amounts

sfink6• 2 years ago

It's more extreme than that, it stops existing.

The comment you're replying to is about fresh water. Which becomes non-fresh when it mixes into seawater or waste or pollution. No need to leave the Earth.

Admittedly, it's probably better to talk about the cycle, since non-freshwater will be automatically converted back to freshwater via solar energy. But the rate can be slowed—eg, dump a bunch of toxic stuff in one place, it'll drain to a river, now everything from that point and downstream is no longer freshwater. Or pump up enough groundwater. Or inject toxic crap down where the groundwater lives.

We're quite good at reducing the total amount of freshwater available.

jumploops• 2 years ago

Let's find a large ice comet and direct it towards Mars!

Aperocky• 2 years ago

That's actually a lot bigger than I thought - The largest asteroid Ceres would be 1/3 the diameter of this water sphere (860mi)

That's a LOT of water.

eh_why_not• 2 years 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't find a good calculation yet.

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

Over the life of Earth to date, about a quarter of its initial water bounty:

<https://www.sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-...>

sahmeepee• 2 years 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.

RIMR2• 2 years ago

I'm sold. Let's do it!

rishikeshs• 2 years 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?

lolinder• 2 years ago

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.

whutsurnaym• 2 years ago

From TFA: "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."

ysofunny• 2 years ago

thank you, you're doing real work with comments like that

utopcell2• 2 years ago

Yeah, but also if you took all humanity and compressed it into a "meat sphere", it would only be 1km wide [1].

[1] https://www.iflscience.com/blended-up-every-living-human-in-...

shironandon• 2 years ago

mmm... meat sphere.

bamboozled• 2 years ago

Helps one understand why pollution is such an insidious problem.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Sounds like the water moon from Iain M Banks "The Algebraist", quote:

"I was born on a water moon.

Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometers in diameter 'moon' 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.

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's way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very center of the moon.

Where a strange thing happened.

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."

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

Shouldn’t this say “surface water”?

wrp• 2 years ago

"Consider a spherical ocean..."

tamimio• 2 years ago

I would like to have a zoomed-in picture of that 'tiny' 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.

MalcolmDwyer• 2 years ago

The Great Lakes span across hundreds of miles, but the deepest point is less than a quarter mile, and most of it is much shallower than that. I.e., it's a super thin film over that big surface area.

elfbargpt• 2 years ago

"Yes, Lake Michigan looks way bigger than this sphere, but you have to try to imagine a bubble almost 35 miles high—whereas the average depth of Lake Michigan is less than 300 feet (91 meters)"

abtinf• 2 years ago

2019

2f0ja• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the short story 'Sea of Dreams'[1] by Liu Cixin. It's in one of his anthologies but I can't remember which one

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61305943-sea-of-dreams

mistercow2• 2 years 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.

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.

syndicatedjelly• 2 years ago

Why is this confusing? We aren't comparing planets by amount of water they have. I thought the goal of this visualization was just to make a point - the amount of fresh water in rivers and lakes appears to be the size of a large metropolis in radius. Seems like a cool way to show scale of water resources

mistercow2• 2 years ago

Well, let me put it this way: that apparently little fresh water sphere? If the ISS passed over that spot, it would hit that.

This is the point: everything on the surface of the Earth is essentially two dimensional at this scale. Seeing a sphere with a 400 km radius placed on the Earth doesn’t give any better intuitions for the scale of water resources than simply reading the number “35 quintillion liters”. If you think it’s given you a better intuition, you’ve been misled.

amelius• 2 years ago

Yes good point. This infographic doesn't scale properly.

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

Jordan Peelems next movie, FLOAT

mikewarot• 2 years ago

It looks too small, perhaps there's more water tied up in the core and mantle than that?

[1] https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=111648

[2] https://www.space.com/water-in-earth-core-forms-crystal-laye...

[3] https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/125691203/An_ocea...

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

NB: The infographic and articles are based on a 1993 publication.

More recent research, from about 2017, suggests that there's about as much water in Earth'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.

See: "There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans" (2017) <https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133963-theres-as-much-...>

The USGS is citing a 1993 publication, Igor Shiklomanov's chapter "World fresh water resources" in Peter H. Gleick (editor), Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York) (see the detail links from the submitted article).

That said, water remains a precious resource, and fresh surface water all the more so.

Edit: /double the size/s/size/volume/ above, for clarity.

utopcell2• 2 years ago

More recent research, from about 2017, suggests that there's about as much water in Earth's mantle as in all the oceans, so we either need another drop roughly the size of the first, or the second drop should be greatly expanded.

Specifically: given that the volume of a sphere is 4/3πR^3, doubling the volume is equivalent to increasing the radius by ~26%.

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

Good call, I've swapped "size" for "volume" to be clearer.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

Does any of that water, though, ever make it onto the Earth's surface? I'm guessing not, or only miniscule amounts over geologic time through volcanism.

For all intents and purposes, I think only counting "surface" water is more useful and intuitive. It's essentially any water that can participate in the hydrologic cycle on Earth, and that water locked beneath the crust doesn't really "matter" for what I think the intended purpose of this graphic is.

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

The fundamental problem with complex phenomena is in defining the domain(s) of interest.

If we want to talk about the total amount of H2O around, on, or in the Earth then inclusion makes sense.

If we want to talk about water interacting with the surface environment (atmospheric, sea, ice cap, fresh, and subsurface aquifers and tectonic water), then splitting those into distinct categories probably also makes sense. In which case we can also show the subsurface water.

How much mantle water does make it to the surface over time is a good question. I've no idea though I'd suspect that some does through geothermal and tectonic activity. The more interesting question might be how we'd determine this (all but certainly through isotopic composition), and if a net flux could be determined.

Over geological time, additional reservoirs of water are significant simply because surface water boils off into space over time, with estimates I've seen of up to 25% of Earth's original allotment having done so over 4.5 billion years or so. As the Sun eventually grows warmer, this rate will increase. At the same time, tectonic activity will slow.

Note that there's a fair bit of water transport through the lower crust / upper mantle as oceanic plates subduct under continental plates, with the water absorbed into the oceanic plates playing a major role in volcanism at those plate boundaries, e.g., along the "Rim of Fire" surrounding the Pacific basin.

card_zero• 2 years ago

We don't have access to any part of the planet below a depth of 2.5 miles, so the image should compare the volume of accessible water to the volume of accessible Earth, except then it would fail in its dishonest mission to make people say "gosh that sphere looks relatively small compared to the other sphere, I must restrict myself to ten-second showers."

Even if it was accessible water to accessible non-water I don't really see how the metric is relevant in any decision making. Is it warning against a half-baked plan to mix water with every available cubic meter of soil or rock? Because there wouldn't be enough water to do that crazy thing? Thanks, I'll bear that in mind.

berkes2• 2 years ago

The article has a strong focus on "available to humans" and "that humans depend on". Many of the water beneath the crust is exactly that, pumping it up is an important source of drinking water. (In my country, the Netherlands, it's the primary, almost only, source of drinking water)

xattt• 2 years ago

second drop should be greatly expanded

Radius of said sphere would only increase by ∛2. ;)

kijin• 2 years ago

or the second drop should be greatly expanded.

The second drop is called "liquid fresh water".

I'm not sure if I would want to categorize the water in the mantle as either "liquid" or "fresh". Most of that stuff is way above the critical point, not to mention saturated with rocky salts.

vixen99• 2 years ago

Seems that Jules Verne (1867) in 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' was onto something when he invented his subterranean ocean.

rdsubhas• 2 years ago

The water discovered in the mantle is not in a form familiar to us – it is not liquid, ice, or vapor. Instead, it is trapped inside the molecular structure of the minerals in the mantle rock.

IMHO this is not a productive comparison. Hydrogen and oxygen ions inside minerals in rock is far too much of a stretch of imagination to call as water.

https://www.earth.com/news/ringwoodite-mineral-confirms-vast...

WarOnPrivacy2• 2 years ago

Hydrogen and oxygen ions inside minerals in rock is far too much of a stretch of imagination to call as water.

Agreed and to follow that thread to the end: We can't impact that water in a meaningful way.

We can't pollute it in dozens of ecosystem-altering ways.

We can't alter it's ability to host systems that sustain life.

We can't bulk-melt the frozen part & in turn alter the salinity + elevation of a liquid part.

We can't pump dry the parts that we desperately need to remain where they are.

umvi2• 2 years ago

I don't think it's "hydrogen and oxygen ions"; that doesn't really meet the definition of water. I'd assume it's more like ebsom salts, where H2O is a part of the crystalline structure of the chemical compound. If you heat up epsom salts enough then the bonds are broken and steam is released.

yourapostasy• 2 years ago

When I see these infographics I think of non-technical audiences like policy makers and politicians consuming the same information, and I avoid making these fine distinctions. In this case, I would not mention the water in the mantle at all.

In a separate, private graphic, I’d show the available water next to the number of 1 GW reactors, the pile of annual uranium mining output to feed those reactors, and annual calendars it would take to assemble all that to extract the water and dispose of the waste in a way that won’t harm our ecosystem further to express, “if you want this water in a form you colloquially understand, the species possibly can’t afford it”. In case some wise ass decides to bring up that mantle water. But that additional detail would even help technically inclined audiences reading the infographic.

veryfancy• 2 years ago

Conspicuously near the Great Lakes (NA)

jongjong• 2 years 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's possible that so little water can spread throughout. At model scale, the water wouldn't spread all the way around the globe because of viscosity and surface tension.

TheRealPomax• 2 years ago

The problem with this sphere is that people are terrible at understanding the mind boggling scale represented by "height" here. It looks like a tiny drop that "fits on the US". Instead it has a diameter of 860 miles. That's a ball of water that reaches all the way to outer space...

...and then keeps going for another 800 miles.

mckravchyk2• 2 years ago

156 x Mt. Everest

fallat• 2 years ago

How do we make more water

Electricniko• 2 years ago

"in a single sphere"---- shows three spheres

100pctremote• 2 years ago

IIRC water in earth's mantle is magnitudes greater than the volume contained in our oceans. I think only part of Earth's H2O story is illustrated by this graphic.

dredmorbius10• 2 years ago

Yes, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240719>

The USGS visualisation is based on a 1993 work, discovery of mantle water is later (roughly 2017).

utkarsh858• 2 years 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' water. Now I got to know it :D

danielodievich• 2 years ago

An xkcd Drain the Oceans https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ is highly entertaining on this vein.

mattmaroon• 2 years ago

Anyone see this and think “holy crap we better scale up desalination?”

alluro2• 2 years ago

I don't really follow a lot of comments questioning the choice of shape, methodology, exclusion of water in the mantle etc.

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 "blue planet".

To me, this is an amazingly effective and visually poignant way of doing just that.

rob7cc• 2 years ago

The water spheres look small but here'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'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's not including the much larger amounts of ground water and ocean water. Those "small spheres" are huge!

divbzero2• 2 years 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].

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/chart-how-much-gold-is-i...

[2] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf (p. 19)

tomcam• 2 years ago

I’ve alerted all my friends in Kentucky. That thing could blow any time.

gorgoiler• 2 years 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.

snowfresco• 2 years ago

Wow, imagine all the data centers you could cool with all that water

Turneyboy3• 2 years ago

Ok I don'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.

jgtrosh• 2 years ago

Counter pedant: a ball is indeed what you get when, as in TFA, you put water “in a sphere”

Turneyboy3• 2 years ago

I agree. It's a volume of water bounded by a sphere. I'm just being pedantic about the common use of the word in this thread.

I'm also somewhat surprised no one else was being pedantic about this. I expect better from HN :)

cromulent• 2 years ago

The volume of humans is approximately 500B liters [1] and this would make a sphere just under 1km in diameter.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+all+humans

webprofusion• 2 years ago

So what we're saying is, if there was less water then I could have really big back yard. Things may get a little crispy though.

Gravityloss• 2 years ago

See, the water amount isn't that 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's comet (assuming it was completely water) was crashed there: 3 mm.

Calculation: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28halley%27s+comet+vol...

moffkalast• 2 years 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.

openrisk• 2 years ago

If you could squeeze the Earth'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]).

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.

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.

[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-much-does-earths-at...

andrei-akopian• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_Abb2Vqnc

ck2• 2 years ago

also related they now believe earth's water is older than the sun by finding a similar pattern around another star

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earth-scientists-...

enriquto• 2 years ago

It would be nice to see the "carbon" 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.

aranaur• 2 years ago

Do oil next!

veunes3• 2 years ago

I don't know why, but it scares me

mckravchyk2• 2 years ago

When you look at the image you can'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 / water destroying / reshaping the surface of the entire continent, anyone has an idea how it would the impact look like?

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.

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

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