What Percentage Of All The Earth's Water Is In A Form That Is Useful To Humans And Land Animals?
The Earth is often compared to a majestic blue marble, especially by those privileged few who accept gazed upon it from orbit. This is due to the prevalence of water on the planet's surface. While water itself is non blue, water gives off blue light upon reflection.
For those of united states bars to living on the surface, the fact that our world is generally covered in h2o is a well known fact. Simply how much of our planet is made up of h2o, exactly? Like nearly facts pertaining to our world, the reply is a little more complicated than you might call up, and takes into account a number of different qualifications.
In simplest terms, water makes up about 71% of the Earth's surface, while the other 29% consists of continents and islands.
To break the numbers downwards, 96.5% of all the Earth's water is contained within the oceans as salt water, while the remaining 3.5% is freshwater lakes and frozen water locked upwardly in glaciers and the polar ice caps. Of that fresh water, almost all of it takes the grade of ice: 69% of information technology, to be exact. If you could melt all that water ice, and the Earth's surface was perfectly smooth, the sea levels would rise to an distance of 2.seven km.
Aside from the water that exists in ice form, there is too the staggering corporeality of water that exists beneath the Earth'due south surface. If y'all were to assemble all the Earth's fresh water together equally a single mass (as shown in the epitome to a higher place) information technology is estimated that it would measure out some ane,386 one thousand thousand cubic kilometers (km3) in volume.
Meanwhile, the amount of water that exists equally groundwater, rivers, lakes, and streams would plant simply over x.six meg km3, which works out to a little over 0.vii%. Seen in this context, the limited and precious nature of freshwater becomes truly clear.
Merely how much of Globe is water—how much water contributes to the bodily mass of the planet? This includes not but the surface of the Earth, but inside as well. Scientists summate that the total mass of the oceans on World is one.35 ten 1018 metric tonnes, which is i/4400 the total mass of the World. In other words, while the oceans embrace 71% of the Globe's surface, they only account for 0.02% of our planet's total mass.
The origin of water on the Earth's surface, as well as the fact that it has more water than whatever other rocky planet in the Solar System, are two of long-standing mysteries concerning our planet.
Not that long agone, it was believed that our planet formed dry some 4.6 billion years ago, with high-free energy impacts creating a molten surface on the infant Earth. According to this theory, water was brought to the world'due south oceans thanks to icy comets, trans-Neptunian objects or water-rich meteoroids (protoplanets) from the outer reaches of the chief asteroid belt colliding with the World.
Even so, more recent research conducted by the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Pigsty, Massachusetts, has pushed the date of these origins back farther. According to this new study, the globe'south oceans as well date back 4.half dozen billion years, when all the worlds of the inner Solar System were still forming.
This conclusion was reached by examining meteorites thought to have formed at different times in the history of the Solar System. Carbonaceous chondrite, the oldest meteorites that take been dated to the very earliest days of the Solar System, were found to take the same chemical science as those originating from protoplanets like Vesta. This includes a significance presence of h2o.
These meteorites are dated to the same epoch in which h2o was believed to have formed on Earth – some 11 million years later the formation of the Solar System. In short, it now appears that meteorites were depositing water on Earth in its earliest days.
While not ruling out the possibility that some of the water that covers 71 percent of Globe today may accept arrived later, these findings advise that at that place was enough already here for life to have begun earlier than idea.
Citation: What percent of Earth is water? (2014, December 2) retrieved vii May 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2014-12-percentage-world.html
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