How Much Water

I was doing some stumbling, I came across the following image from the UN Environmental Programme. Click on the link and look at the whole thing, I have bits and pieces throughout the post, but without looking at it, you won't get as much out of this.



Oceans are huge; this is nothing new, but I never knew that they compose 97.5% of the water on earth. Think about it, the great lakes, the Nile, the Amazon, the polar ice caps, all completely dwarfed.



I had no idea how much groundwater there was. I mean, the earth's crust is enormous, and it all has water, but it's something that I had never thought of before. Same with glaciers, but I'm less surprised than I was about groundwater.



The only thing here that really surprised me was that last one, because I never really think about plants and animals being composed of water. Sure, in elementary school you learn that we're made up something like 2/3 water, but all of the animals on earth don't really take up that much space relative to everything else. I assume plants take up a lot more than animals; I wish they had broken that down as well. I would venture to guess that plants take up at least 95% of that category, any other guesses?

So if you do the calculations, freshwater lakes only compose 0.00674% of the water on Earth. Very interesting stuff. Again, it's pretty cool to look at the whole image as one piece, so here's the link again.

Godspeed.


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