Fun fact: If you did this, everyone would die.
All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
81–90 of 290 posts
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#82Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
Underground
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#83I 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.
> damp rock
lol it's funny when you put it that way
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#84Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
Groundwater, and swamp water, the post explains.
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#85Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
> 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.
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#86Where is liquid fresh water besides lakes and rivers?
Groundwater mostly, but also clouds (minuscule amount).
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#87This freaks me out, and I have no idea why...
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#88I think this is kind of useless information unless presented with other spheres for humans, structures, animals, plants, forests etc. for comparison. And ants.
And Olympic sized pools.
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Volume functions are not exponential. They are polynomial. (Fair point that people are lousy at estimating even polynomial functions, though...)
> 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
Exponential is c^x=y
Polynomial is x^c=y
Logarithmic is c^y=x
Re: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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!
Helped for me to compare to the moon. The water sphere has less than half the radius of the moon (~1080 miles). Think that’s roughly 7-8% of the moon’s volume if it were a perfect sphere.