13 ms·

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

• CodeWriter23 2y 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.
  • nemo44x 2y ago
    And Olympic sized pools.
  • yardstick 2y 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 2y ago
      Wolfram Alpha had "us" making a 966 m sphere. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=estimated+total+volume+of+all+humans+on+Earth&assumption=%22ClashPrefs%22+-%3E+%7B%22Miscellaneous%22%7D 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+meters&assumption=%22ClashPrefs%22+-%3E+%22%22 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4.73%C3%9710%5E8+cubic+...
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  ... it's about as much water as this place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    It would use up roughly the same volume, but it'd be a lot more water. (Much heavier, I suspect, as well.)
    • rachofsunshine 2y 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 2y ago
    So, crash Ceres into Mars, and we have made a huge step towards terraforming?
    • PaulHoule 2y 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.
      • maxbond 2y ago
        Is there reason to believe the stars are less of a dead end than Mars? It's easy to imagine us making a huge bet on interstellar travel, and just dying in interstellar space. Surely there's untold abundance in the stars, but if you can't actually reach it, then it may as well be a mirage. Whenever I consider the possibility of interplanetary colonization, I come back to the conclusion that the only way to make it feasible is to reorient our economy towards sustainability in order to survive on Earth indefinitely. It's going to take a long, long time to develop the required technology, there's no real reason to believe artificial terraforming is even possible (since our sample size is 0), and even if it is it may take thousands or millions of years to complete. I'm not being facetious with that last part, in the absence of information to the contrary, we should expect technology that works via geologic processes to run on a geologic timescale. I personally think artificial terraforming is probably possible, and that we could accelerate it to be much faster than the natural terraforming of Earth. But accelerating a 2 billion year process to be 10000x faster still takes 200k years. (ETA: I suppose a lot of that was the planet forming and the rate of bombardment falling to something tolerable, which eg Mars was already subject to, so maybe call it 1B/100k years.)
        • PaulHoule 2y ago
          I did a lot of analysis for the problem of "build a solar sail factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that makes sunshades to deploy at the L1 point", particularly from a chemical engineering point of view. One interesting thing was that a lot of the chemistry involved was similar to the chemistry of decarbonization and carbon capture, particularly when you get CO2 as a waste product it is too precious to vent so you are going to feed it back into your "petrochemical" line. Objects like Ceres are the norm once you get out to the outer solar system, the difference is that Ceres is close enough to the sun for solar energy to be a good power source. Centaur objects, the moons of outer planets, and Kuiper belt objects like Pluto are similar but when you get far from the Sun you need to use a different power source such as D-D fusion. If a species became independent of sunlight it could take advantage of very generic objects that exist throughout interstellar space (comets, rouge planets, etc.) and make the journey in hops of (say) 100 years from one object to another. At that rate it would be possible to visit another star system in 10,000 years with a comfortable lifestyle. People like that might as well keep comet hopping but if they came across a star system I'd imagine they start some project like a Ceres megastructure because it is generic you can find some object like that and be able to establish a huge industrial base and population larger than the Earth with the same head end you've used all this time and same comfortable lifestyle. Earth would be priority two if that for those people. Grabby aliens might have disrupted Ceres but left the dinosaurs alone. But Ceres is here, so they were not. Ceres is such an attractive target that it should be a SETI goal to look for hardware left behind. Would be hilarious if they stole the Deuterium.
• deleted 2y ago
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• m3kw9 2y ago
  The height of the sphere isn’t easy to visualize, should over lay height of water over Americas area
  • g15jv2dp 2y ago
    It's a sphere, the height is equal to the diameter that you plainly see on the picture.
  • mecsred 2y 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.
  • didgetmaster 2y ago
    The beauty of a sphere is that ANY dimension is EVERY dimension! Height, length, width, depth, etc. are all the same.
  • rachofsunshine 2y 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+cubic+miles%29+%2F+%28area+of+united+states%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28332%2C500%2C000+cubi...
    • didgetmaster 2y ago
• mensetmanusman 2y 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 2y 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 https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold
  • nightpool 2y 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.
    • vesinisa 2y 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.
    • deleted 2y ago
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  • dylan604 2y 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 2y ago
• downboots 2y ago
  Wouldn't a cube be a better choice for visualizing volume? A more complete version would do it alongside with minerals, biomass, etc
  • fny 2y 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.
  • mulhoon 2y ago
    Why?
    • margalabargala 2y 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.
      • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        Volume functions are not exponential. They are polynomial. (Fair point that people are lousy at estimating even polynomial functions, though...)
        • dylan604 2y ago
          > They are polynomial I don't think this word means what you think it does. Or I don't. Exponents are just the number the value is raised. Squaring a value just uses an exponent of 2 where cubing uses an exponent of 3. Polynomials are x^2 + x + 1 type of equations. But admittedly, it has been 30+ years since I've thought about them at that level, so maybe I'm the one with fuzzy groking
• bell-cot 2y 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?
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240719>
• deleted 2y ago
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• geepytee 2y ago
  Does this include the water inside of living creatures?
  • bowmessage 2y ago
    Yes, from TFA: > and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
• umvi 2y 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 https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=111648) or other non-liquid water for that matter like hydrates (ebsom salts, etc)
  • moralestapia 2y 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 2y ago
      "Groundwater" is a little ambiguous - H2O in the mantle is also "ground water", no?
      • moralestapia 2y ago
        It's not. The mantle is hundreds of kilometers further down.
      • pfdietz 2y ago
        No, that "water" is actually hydroxyl groups in minerals.
        • chrisco255 2y ago
          No it comes out of the tap as water.
          • mkl 2y ago
            No tap water comes from the mantle.
• richardmuhn 2y ago
  [flagged]
• myself248 2y 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...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • maushu 2y ago
    He already did it with a 1km diameter ball (https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/) and the destruction was terrifying. Please keep him away from these other bigger water balls.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      It was just a friendly game of water balloons. We had no intent of destroying your planet.
  • jameshart 2y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q
• deleted 2y ago
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• rmah 2y 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 2y 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.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • laweijfmvo 2y 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!
      • lanna 2y ago
        Yes. The fresh-water lakes and rivers sphere definitely does not look like it could fill the Great Lakes next to it. I am not saying it doesn't, I'm just saying it doesn't look like it could.
        • njarboe 2y ago
          It does look very small in comparison to say Lake Michigan but most lakes are very thin. Lake Michigan is about 500km by 200km but only .085km(85m) average depth.
• kevinkeller 2y 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-worlds-fill-the-outer-solar-system/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overlooked-ocean-...
  • teekert 2y ago
    https://www.businessinsider.nl/earth-water-ice-volume-versus-planets-moons-2016-11/?international=true&r=US https://www.businessinsider.nl/earth-water-ice-volume-versus... Ganymede vs. Earth is indeed very surprising!
  • JumpCrisscross 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper [2] https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-might-crash-into-ganymede https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-might-crash-into-ganyme...
  • Sparkyte 2y ago
    We could probably terraform Mars if we crashed Europa into Mars.
    • staplers 2y ago
      Might have some "slight" orbital and shrapnel repercussions..
    • wildzzz 2y ago
      And then we completely skew Mars's orbit until it crashes into the sun or is flung out of the solar system.
• jzl 2y 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 https://youtu.be/b3_Abb2Vqnc
• Smudo 2y ago
  i want to se a Fluid simulation of this drop with an earth model
• rising-sky 2y ago
  Pretty interesting juxtaposition considering water makes up about 71% of the Earth's surface, while the other 29% consists of continents and islands!
  • digging 2y 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-sky 2y 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
      • beAbU 2y ago
        The earth is smoother than a billiard ball when accounting for relative size. Highly likely the earth is actually flatter than your countertop when accounting for size.
        • digging 2y ago
          I don't believe that's actually true, I looked that up myself and it appears to be a mistaken calculation that many pop sci articles ran with.
      • digging 2y ago
        That was my point. The Earth isn't flat, but its surface is very smooth. You give the average ocean depth at 3.7km, but the Earth's diameter is about 12,742km, making those bumps pretty insignificant. If you cover your countertop in sandpaper and spill water on it, the difference in coverage going to be almost negligible.
        • 2y ago
• yogurtboy 2y ago
  I honestly find this extremely unsettling. There should definitely be more, though I don't really want our planet to look like Kamino
• sfink 2y 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 2y ago
    > damp rock lol it's funny when you put it that way
  • oorza 2y ago
    Closer to a bowling ball that picked up a drop of beer from your hands.
    • nwiswell 2y 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.
      • silisili 2y ago
        Thanks. This really put it in perspective for me better than the image or other analogies!
      • arrowleaf 2y ago
        You'd have to use the volume of earth, not the mass. Google tells me that lava is ~3x denser than water.
        • 2y ago
• bozhark 2y ago
  "All the Earth's FRESH Water"
  • losvedir 2y ago
    Nope. That's the small (not barely visible tiny) ball.
  • stronglikedan 2y ago
    "all of Earth's water, Earth's liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers"
• Sparkyte 2y 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-we-brought-water-from-the-deepest-ocean-to-the-surface-in-a-sealed-container/#:~:text=And%20if%20you%20took%20a,the%20time%20of%20sample%20collection https://www.technology.org/how-and-why/what-would-happen-if-.... So I feel like the USGS is exagerated.
  • rachofsunshine 2y 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.
    • Sparkyte 2y ago
      I figured it would be within 5% margin. I find this pretty interesting, https://phys.org/news/2023-11-reveal-earth-surface-penetrate-deep.html https://phys.org/news/2023-11-reveal-earth-surface-penetrate...
• nashashmi 2y 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 VS 1.2 microspheres of seawater expected to melt this year
• frabjoused 2y ago
  Pertinent video that came out 4 hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUNHhVbQ1Q
• raldi 2y ago
  Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
  • schmichael 2y 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.
  • hrunt 2y ago
    Underground
  • autophagian 2y ago
    Groundwater, and swamp water, the post explains.
  • comboy 2y ago
    Groundwater mostly, but also clouds (minuscule amount).
• jrflowers 2y ago
  Fun fact: If you did this, everyone would die.
  • pimlottc 2y ago
    Plus every other nation on the earth would be mad at the US for taking it all
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • morepork 2y ago
      Outside of Hawaii and maybe Alaska, everywhere in the US would be devastated by the ensuing flood
    • jameshart 2y ago
      Except for the Dutch. https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/
• itohihiyt 2y ago
  This freaks me out, and I have no idea why...
• nemo44x 2y ago
  It's about 554.4 trillion Olympic-sized swimming pools, if you're interested.
• srameshc 2y 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 2y ago
    Does water leave earth when used?
    • morepork 2y ago
      Only tiny amounts
    • sfink 2y 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 2y ago
  Let's find a large ice comet and direct it towards Mars!
• Aperocky 2y 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 2y 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.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Over the life of Earth to date, about a quarter of its initial water bounty: <https://www.sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-earth-has-lost-a-quarter-of-its-water/1462713 https://www.sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-...>
• RIMR 2y ago
  I'm sold. Let's do it!
• sahmeepee 2y 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.
• rishikeshs 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      thank you, you're doing real work with comments like that
• utopcell 2y 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-the-world-would-make-a-meatball-just-three-eiffel-towers-wide-63963 https://www.iflscience.com/blended-up-every-living-human-in-...
  • shironandon 2y ago
    mmm... meat sphere.
• bamboozled 2y ago
  Helps one understand why pollution is such an insidious problem.
• andrewstuart 2y 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 2y ago
  Shouldn’t this say “surface water”?
• wrp 2y ago
  "Consider a spherical ocean..."
• tamimio 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  2019
• 2f0ja 2y 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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61305943-sea-of-dreams
• mistercow 2y 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 2y 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
    • mistercow 2y 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 2y ago
    Yes good point. This infographic doesn't scale properly.
• brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  Jordan Peelems next movie, FLOAT
• mikewarot 2y 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 https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=111648 [2] https://www.space.com/water-in-earth-core-forms-crystal-layer https://www.space.com/water-in-earth-core-forms-crystal-laye... [3] https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/125691203/An_ocean_inside_the_Earth__Water_hundreds_of_kilometres_down https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/125691203/An_ocea...
• dredmorbius 2y 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-water-in-earths-mantle-as-in-all-the-oceans/ 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.
  • utopcell 2y 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%.
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      Good call, I've swapped "size" for "volume" to be clearer.
  • hn_throwaway_99 2y 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.
• veryfancy 2y ago
  Conspicuously near the Great Lakes (NA)
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• yamumsafknho 2y ago
  [flagged]
• jongjong 2y 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 2y 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.
  • mckravchyk 2y ago
    156 x Mt. Everest
• fallat 2y ago
  How do we make more water
• Electricniko 2y ago
  "in a single sphere"---- shows three spheres
• 100pctremote 2y 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.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Yes, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240719 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 2y 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 2y ago
  An xkcd Drain the Oceans https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ is highly entertaining on this vein.
• mattmaroon 2y ago
  Anyone see this and think “holy crap we better scale up desalination?”
• alluro2 2y 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 2y 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!
• divbzero 2y 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-in-the-world/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/chart-how-much-gold-is-i... [2]: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf (p. 19)
• tomcam 2y ago
  I’ve alerted all my friends in Kentucky. That thing could blow any time.
• gorgoiler 2y 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 2y ago
  Wow, imagine all the data centers you could cool with all that water
• Turneyboy 2y 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 2y ago
    Counter pedant: a ball is indeed what you get when, as in TFA, you put water “in a sphere”
    • Turneyboy 2y 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 2y 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 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+all+humans
• webprofusion 2y 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 2y 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+volume%29%2F%28mars+surface+area%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28halley%27s+comet+vol...
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• moffkalast 2y 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 2y 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-atmosphere-weigh https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-much-does-earths-at...
• andrei-akopian 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_Abb2Vqnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_Abb2Vqnc
• ck2 2y 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-orion-water-alma-b2296663.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earth-scientists-...
• enriquto 2y 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 2y ago
  Do oil next!
• veunes 2y ago
  I don't know why, but it scares me
• mckravchyk 2y 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.