How the Water System Works
11 comments
·May 1, 2025m3047
jcranmer
I think the interpretation is "take the volume of fresh surface water on Earth", then "make that volume into a perfect sphere", and the diameter of that sphere is smaller than NYC.
sandworm101
I don't think that is even true. This may refer to the total volume of potable water. between the great lakes and Antarctica, there is lots of non-salt water out there. Easy google results show 35 million cubic kilometers, which is a rather large sphere.
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/volume-of-sphere-...
A 35 million cubic kilometer sphere would be roughly 400km across. NYC is big, but not that big.
jcranmer
The volume of the Great Lakes, per Wolfram Alpha [1], makes a sphere ~22 miles in diameter. The Great Lakes is ~20% of the world's surface fresh water.
Your number of 35 million cubic kilometers includes the Antarctic ice sheet, but the definition of "fresh surface water" sounds to me like it intends to exclude the ice sheets from the list.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28volume+of+great+lake...
1970-01-01
Water is why life never left Earth. We would already be living on Mars or the moon if there was just a lake or two of water. Water got what plants crave.
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...
lubitelpospat
If irrigation consumes 75%, and industry consumes another 20 - how can household usage be at 10%? I feel like these numbers are a little misleading.
southernplaces7
Without digging into the validity of the numbers, it doesn't seem so odd to me. Agricultural and industrial uses of anything are on a huge, well, industrial scale, and domestic uses are numerous but relatively small in comparison and people tend to overestimate them because these uses are what most of us more directly and frequently observe.
It's sort of like CO2 production. Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution", while real CO2 production remains the same or rises since something like 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen corporations globally.
viccis
>Although a dozen or so Johnny Appleseed festivals are still celebrated, he is less likely to be found in children’s books today.
Is this true? Grade school was full of Johnny Appleseed facts when I was a kid.
Calwestjobs
Great article.
> There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City.
I'm not sure what this means. I think we could drop New York City in one of the Great Lakes with little problem... or drop Moscow in Lake Baikal if you prefer.