“One of the most boggling experiences I have is standing on a beach staring at the ocean. It’s just a silly amount of water. And then there’s all this water underground, and more in the atmosphere, and there are lakes and rivers and streams and marshes and swamps and snow and glaciers and ponds and puddles. So I’ve been thinking about all this water and how I don’t really have a handle on how much of it there really is. It’s clear what needs to happen— I need to cube it. I need to put all the world’s water in cubes so I can look at it all at once and grasp how much there really is…so if you took all of that water and put it into a huge cube, how big would the cube be if you place it on top of the U.S.? A cube with a side of 693 miles, whose base stretches from Indianapolis to Denver.”
97% of the Earth’s water is sitting in Oceans. A mere 3% of all water is fresh water…0.3% of the 3% of all fresh water is surface water (e.g., lakes, rivers)
And, if you were going to put all of the Earth’s drinkable water in a cube, how big would it be? Continue reading “Precious”