Geekologie I Watch Stuff The Superficial

All Water On Earth As Sphere Compared To Size Of Earth

May 8, 2012 / earth, glug glug glug, h2o, holy smokes, i don't believe it!, learning by looking, maybe i should get that leaky faucet repaired after all, solar system, the ol' clear and tasteless, there is water inside of me right now but i wish it were beer sorry but i'm being honest!, water

all-the-water-on-earth.jpg

This is a visual comparison of all the water on earth compared to the actual size of earth, if all the water where held in a sphere. As you can see, it doesn't look like very much. Weird, I could have sworn I learned in school that the oceans went all the way through earth's core. "What the f*** what kind of school did you go to?" Home.

The picture...shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth. You're probably thinking I missed a decimal point when running my calculator since surely all the water on, in, and above the Earth would fill a ball a lot larger than that "tiny" blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas. But, no, this diagram is indeed correct.


About 70 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water. But water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and...even in you and your dog. Still, all that water would fit into that "tiny" ball. The ball is actually much larger than it looks like on your computer monitor or printed page because we're talking about volume, a 3-dimensional shape, but trying to show it on a flat, 2-dimensional screen or piece of paper. That tiny water bubble has a diameter of about 860 miles, meaning the height (towards your vision) would be 860 miles high, too! That is a lot of water.

Wow, with so little looking water I almost feel bad having a pool. Just kidding, I don't have a pool. My bedroom does flood when it rains though. It makes the carpet smell ooky!

Thanks to beebs, who actually stumbled upon this graphic looking for an accurate moon to moon-cheese comparison.

There are Comments

  • I've checked the math...and if the Diameter of the Earth is 7901 miles, the earths volume should be 2.5824 e+11 miles. If all the water on earth is 315 million cubic miles, the diameter of this ball would be 844 miles. 7901/844 = 9.36
    To visualize...a Basketball is 760 mm, and a pingpong ball is 40 mm. 760/40=19
    So....the represented picture is out by quite a bit...feel free to correct me.

  • Artor

    It hurts my brain to see how many commenters refuse to believe this could possibly be right. Even though the article specifically says it accounts for groundwater & atmospheric moisture, almost everyone brings those up with a "but...but..."

  • what about the ground level unseen table water?? The rivers and streams underground when you dig a well, water comes out of it. THAT - did we factor water table water into the equation? And I agree with the commenter who says if only 10% of the ocean floor is mapped then this representation is at best 10% accurate. THIS is what academics call PSEUDO-SCIENCE ... cool to see, but a useless "guess-o-fact."

  • JJtoob

    Would that be about if not a bit bigger than the moon?

  • Edward Hopkins

    This may look like not enough water for such a big planet, but it's not the planet that needs water, it's the life on the planet that needs it. If you made a sphere out of all the biomass on earth, it would have a diameter of maybe 6 or 7 miles. That's a speck next to the 860 mile sphere of water. If you made a sphere of all humanity, it would be about *800 yards (8 football fields) in diameter.
    *edit

  • Keep in mind that those tiny, little ridges you see on Earth there are thousands of feet to MILES DEEP.  On this scale it takes very little water to fill it.

  • Azariel_z

    doesn't look right to some people, because they can 't imagine the Ocean as a thin layer ( compared to earth's radius ) 

  • The maths is done right there for you.

    And Pienix, the reason that the sphere in the image is "too large" is, as the dude explained, there is also water in lakes, rivers, humans, glaciers and the atmosphere that you didn't account for.

  • noybman

    True True, but also, did they account for the Marianas trench? how about most definitely old dormant volcanoes which have created vast cavernous voids when they erupted, in the ocean, the water most certainly filled these voids. We cannot see these voids, and our science has only (pardon the pun) began to scratch the surface of radar spectography so how can we state ho much water lies under the earths surface and within the soil all around us?
    Water takes the path of least resistance and gravity tells it where to go, which, is a journey to the center of the earth! So GW humor aside, there is A LOT OF FREAKING WATER on this planet we cannot see.
    Hrrrrmmmm, perhaps thats the cause of the mysterious disappearance of the earths water! Or, its in the basement of the white house!

  • Pienix

    For all you "this can't be right!" idiots: learn to math.

    Total volume of the oceans is about 1.3 billion km³ (yes, metric system, because science). If you put that in a sphere (volume= 4/3*Pi*r³), you get a radius of about 680km (435miles). So if anything, the sphere on the picture is too large.

  • meetingrichdotcom

    ( ⊙o⊙ )    I can't believe this .        And  somebody  look  at  my  name  site ?

  • This is stupid. The Earth is not spherical. Do you forget the abyssal zone? There are deeper areas and there are more superficial areas. This is wrong.

  • Guest

    Our planet Earth looks a bit thirsty in this picture here.

  • NoveltyFishHead

    I feel sad and weird until some form of logic kicks in a few seconds later.

  • Naomi Williams

    I don't believe it. Turn that "water" into clay, and I don't think it would be possible to smear it thin enough to cover even a fraction of the ocean surface.

  • artilleryboy

    i like water

  • Kenlin Bros

    It's almost as if a thin spherical shell at a large radius takes up less volume than a sphere of approximately the same radius!

    BURN THE CALCULUS!

  • Agent539

    He should have included multiple angles to prove his point.

    539

  • Buss_Shots

    I call shanaynay goats on dis one.

  • I'm with you. i don't think that's right

blog comments powered by Disqus