261–270 of 290 posts
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.
Mars is the same, right? Just the water is locked 20 - 200km beneath the surface from recent discoveries.
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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.
There’s nothing wrong with their representation. You’re describing a different comparison.
But the comments here are full of "it's so little!" variants, where if you took the rest of the Crust and smashed as a sphere, it wouldn't be much larger than the water one.
It did evidently mislead a large number of people.
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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 in…
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)
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.
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.
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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 in…
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…
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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)
An interesting point, perhaps it's just me, but my initial reaction to this was that, for purposes of comparison, the volume of "usable" or maybe inhabitable land be measured instead, as opposed to the volume of the entire planet including mantle, core, etc. this graphic seems very prone to misinterpretation and usage as a memetic weapon against globalization, as it is.
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-th…
> 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...
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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.
Let's do it. No one remembers a coward.
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TIL. I did not get that that from the article. Thanks for correcting me. I simply presumed that water that's pumped from layers 100m or lower below the surface, water that's sometimes 10.000 years "old", wasn't surface water. But it makes sense to lump it in there too.
The crust is about 40km thick. The deepest anyone has ever dug is ~12km[0]. It is quite weird to think we live on this crust which has a gigantic mass inside that we can't get to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
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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)
It does separate liquid fresh water from surface lakes and rivers which makes me believe the middle ball includes reasonably accessible ground water.
The breakout is for comparison: surface freshwater (total) and surface freshwater (lakes and rivers) relatively.