Definitely one of the coolest thing I have ever seen. Both links are worth reading full; full of some amazing and shocking facts!

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html

[There are more links on each of the 2 pages you can follow, for example, rivers, lakes, glaciers, etc]

Example of a shocking fact:

Quote :

"In fact, there is a hundred times more water in the ground than is in all the world's rivers and lakes."

Now for the thread title:

Quote :

"This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers), with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant."

Volume = 366 quintillion gallons = 366 million trillion gallons = 366 x 10^18 gallons.
That's about 1/780 times the earth's volume.

Mass = 1.4 quintillion tons = 1.4 million trillion tons = 1.4 x 10^18 tons.
That's about 1/4,300 times the earth's mass.



[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 9:11 AM. Reason : 4,300/780 = 5.5 g/cm^3 = density of the earth!]

12/30/2010 9:08:14 AM

Interesting....I woulda thought that it would be bigger

12/30/2010 9:15:29 AM

me too

12/30/2010 9:18:20 AM

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

12/30/2010 9:20:50 AM

so did i... but considering that it is hard to see 3d on a screen, it does make sense.

that ball is 860 MILES tall!!!

and also considering that oceans are mostly about 2-5 miles deep, and they contain 96% of all the water, a ball of water 860 miles high makes sense.

12/30/2010 9:21:13 AM

Yeah, the whole "70% of Earth's surface is covered in water" statement makes it seem like there's much more water on the Earth than there really is. That's the impression I always had at least.

[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 9:23 AM. Reason : imagine how bad it would suck if that really happened, then the ball of water burst...]

12/30/2010 9:22:45 AM

Kiss north and south america good bye! (and nearby places toooooooo!)

12/30/2010 9:26:48 AM

all your water are belong to U.S.

12/30/2010 9:29:28 AM

The ISS (Int. Space Station) is at an altitude of about 220 miles, so this ball would be 4 times higher!

And that truly gives you perspective, and then it is easy to see why that size ball makes sense. It is friggin massive!

And this:

Quote :

"If all of the world's water was poured on the United States, it would cover the land to a depth of 90 miles (145 kilometers)."

12/30/2010 9:43:00 AM

yea, that sphere is actually fucking huge. it'd be a small moon (keep in mind the radius of this sphere is about 700km): http://www.usefulcharts.com/math-and-science/astronomy/planets-and-moons.html

by the way,

Colorado is fucked

12/30/2010 10:10:02 AM

that'd be pretty baller for like the early settlers though. be driving your wagon across the plain and come across a giant ball of water sitting on the ground

plus, it'd be the ultimate resource. first person to settle that area is gonna make a truckload of cash selling that stuff

[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 12:03 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2010 12:03:11 PM

haha that would be funny.

i wonder though, if one came across it, if they could tell it was a sphere.

well, you could definitely drive to the point where it would be touching the ground (with a huge mass of water above you!), and then if you looked back, it would extend 430 miles out, but i doubt one could see the curvature as it is so huge. you can only see, what some 15 miles at the most (the horizon). so i would say no one would be able to tell it was a sphere.

i do wonder, though, how it would look from hundreds of miles away. perhaps from a few hundred miles away, one could make out it is a sphere.

12/30/2010 12:09:11 PM

pretty cool thread. i checked out one of the sites briefly, but i'm going to go back and read some more. nice find.

12/30/2010 12:34:52 PM

I want to see someone animate that ball hitting the earth, and watch it trickle into the oceans

12/30/2010 12:35:56 PM

I don't buy it.


If that bubble were butter, you couldn't hardly spread that shit HALF way around the world.


They fucked up.

[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 1:31 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2010 1:30:31 PM

It's not butter and you're bad at both math and conceptualizing.

The average depth of our oceans is 12,430ft. That sphere has a diameter of 4,540,800ft.

It's not your fault though. Humans are very very bad at conceptualizing the very large or very old.

12/30/2010 1:36:34 PM

It's okay that you don't have common sense.


It's visually apparent that the ball can't cover the surface of earth

12/30/2010 1:38:08 PM

Why a sphere?

I've always been a bigger advocate of the rhombus

12/30/2010 1:41:33 PM

Quote :

"It's okay that you don't have common sense. It's visually apparent that the ball can't cover the surface of earth"

Except that it's not. If you look at the apparent depth of the oceans even in that picture, you would see that the depth needed to fill those oceans is very very slim. The average depth of the oceans is less than one 360th of the diameter of the sphere of water itself.

From this perspective, the water spread out into the oceans would appear more as a thin film rather than a spread of butter. Your conceptualization about butter is what's fucking with your sense here.

12/30/2010 1:44:40 PM

Where all da dead fishies at?

12/30/2010 1:46:12 PM

Quote :

"It's visually apparent that the ball can't cover the surface of earth"

wow. just wow.

12/30/2010 1:52:31 PM

^^^ Agree. The 3d image is screwing with everyones mind. An 860 mile diamater ball of water is just freaking huge.

Compared to the DEPTH of the Earth's crust/mantle/core, that sphere ratio looks about right. The depth of the oceans are just tiny compared to the Earth itself. Considering the Earth's diameter is about 7,900 miles and the ocean is only a mile or two deep on average, it just looks misleading when it's put next to the mass of the Earth.

Edit...I see now that the statistic includes ice caps

[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 2:00 PM. Reason : ]

12/30/2010 1:55:21 PM

NotGeniuSxBoY, define 'cover'.

Did you read this:

Quote :

"If all of the world's water was poured on the United States, it would cover the land to a depth of 90 miles (145 kilometers)."

Are you saying that if you wanted to cover the world instead of the US, you couldn't spread that 90 miles deep water to the whole world, even a mm in depth? And simple calculation will show you that:

Area of earth = (510,072,000/9,826,675) times the area of the US.
Area of earth = 52 times the area of the US.

Therefore, if all the water were to be spread uniformly across the earth, its depth would be:

90/52 miles = 1.73 miles

So, fuck a mm, that's right, all the water can cover the WHOLE world 1.73 miles deep

Heck, even the water in the atmosphere, which is just 1/100,000 of the total water, can cover the whole world to 1 inch deep:

Quote :

"About 3,100 mi3 (12,900 km3) of water, mostly in the form of water vapor, is in the atmosphere at any one time. If it all fell as precipitation at once, the Earth would be covered with only about 1 inch of water."

The mind boggles!

So if that ball were butter, you can cover the whole earth with a 1.73 mile thick layer

Quote :

"Why a sphere? I've always been a bigger advocate of the rhombus"

Huh? A rhombus is a 2D shape. Pick any 3D shape you want, and you can calculate its dimensions, as long as you know how to calculate the volume of said 3D shape.

[Edited on December 30, 2010 at 2:03 PM. Reason : ]

12/30/2010 1:56:27 PM

Quote :

"Area of earth = 52 times the area of the earth. "

Does not compute

12/30/2010 1:59:14 PM

Quote :

"i do wonder, though, how it would look from hundreds of miles away. perhaps from a few hundred miles away, one could make out it is a sphere."

You can make out the earth as a sphere from the ISS, so yeah. Prob. pretty easily from 200 miles away.

12/30/2010 2:34:25 PM

Quote :

"^^^ Agree. The 3d image is screwing with everyones mind. An 860 mile diamater ball of water is just freaking huge"

The 3-d image is accurate and looks fine. You can barely see any depth on the oceans relative to the whole mass of the Earth.

What's even more fun to think about is how infinitesimally small our rock is compared to the rest of the Universe. At least once every second, somewhere in our Universe a star explodes destroying itself and anything lucky enough to be near it.

12/30/2010 2:34:46 PM

looking at that photo, we may have reached peak butter

12/30/2010 2:41:31 PM

kudos to GeniuSxBoY

Quote :

"baiting nerds is easy"

and now I'm hungry for pizza

12/30/2010 2:43:33 PM

Quote :

"Where all da dead fishies at?"

nah they're all swimming in the sphere.

12/30/2010 2:45:15 PM

^^trolling nerds and especially in The Lounge should be a ban-able offense.

12/30/2010 2:48:37 PM

^^ most of the sphere would be ice

12/30/2010 3:14:38 PM

^ all the freshwater fish would be dead anyway

12/30/2010 4:16:22 PM

If you hunt down the high resolution copy of that image you can actually zoom in on the sphere of water and see Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper battling it out.

12/31/2010 12:21:47 AM

They're not accounting for all the undiscovered under-ocean rivers and reservoirs. Imagine the butter spreading and melting into the earth's porous surface. If you calculate only the surface butter, you'd miss the other half of the butter that soaked through the surface.

Plus, this sucker needs toasting before you butter it. I think Mars would look better buttered, don't you?

12/31/2010 1:31:14 AM

i like this thread.

12/31/2010 1:48:16 AM

I love size comparisons. (yeah, yeah)
here are some other ones of the solar system i've always liked.




Pluto and Charon (it's moon) compared to the US.




Inner planets (with pluto)



Outer planets compared to inner planets





Solar system compared to sun...

and i could go on comparing the sun to other stars, but i wont.

12/31/2010 1:55:53 AM

DO IT

I AN'T SKURRED

12/31/2010 9:10:44 AM

I just went out and saw the ISS... and then I thought, that's only a quarter of the way up compared to that ball of water...

FUCK

THAT BALL IS MASSIVE!!!


^^

12/31/2010 8:48:19 PM

Quote :

"Now if you take a glass of water then add 2 cubes of ice You should see the cup's water level slightly rise, right? You need to watch what I'mma show you (watch this) You need to look closely at what I'mma show you (listen to this right here) If you remove every living animal out of the sea Then wouldn't the world's ocean water level decrease? This means the planet wasn't 3-quarters water (that was deep) This means the planet wasn't 3-quarters water (that shit was deep)"

It's nigganometry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOj8SUNwp8E#t=02m02s

12/31/2010 10:39:35 PM

If all the world's water were collected in one place as a sphere, what would be the diameter of that sphere?

Definitely putting that as one of the bonus questions on all my 6 final exams that I am gonna make and give in about 10 days!

I am sad no one ever asked me that question, and that I never pondered it on my own, because I would have loved to see now how close my guess would have been to the actual answer. Now I will never know. Definitely asking the wife, though (and parents and siblings and friends), before I show it to them.

1/2/2011 9:30:17 PM

Quote :

"THAT BALL IS MASSIVE!!! "

that's what she said!


I used the water ball image for my earth science and marine science classes today

1/4/2011 12:16:21 PM

Quote :

"If that bubble were butter"

this made me lol


...also, the earth is flat ok. all this stuff is just jibberish

1/4/2011 6:23:03 PM

ITT we compare all the water to earth.

IT embed, we see how much space we take up if all the people in the world stood shoulder to shoulder.


<div><object width="512" height="322"><param name="movie" value="http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.46" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="AllowScriptAccess" VALUE="always" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><param name="flashVars" value="id=23705197&vid=8694414&lang=en-us&intl=us&thumbUrl=http%3A//l.yimg.com/a/i/us/sch/cn/video04/8694414_rnda2cf8b7f_19.jpg&embed=1&ap=12135647" /><embed src="http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.46" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="322" allowFullScreen="true" AllowScriptAccess="always" bgcolor="#000000" flashVars="id=23705197&vid=8694414&lang=en-us&intl=us&thumbUrl=http%3A//l.yimg.com/a/i/us/sch/cn/video04/8694414_rnda2cf8b7f_19.jpg&embed=1&ap=12135647" ></embed></object><br /><a href="http://video.yahoo.com/watch/8694414/23705197">7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine</a> @ <a href="http://video.yahoo.com" >Yahoo! Video</a></div>

1/5/2011 3:59:28 AM

1/5/2011 9:34:12 AM

^, ^^ nice, thanks!

I asked one of my classes today (uni students) orally, and the answers were far too big. For size of the water ball they ranged from

1/2 the volume of the earth (which means 80% of the earth's diameter)
to
25% of the earth's diameter (1/64 of the earth's volume)

when in reality it is about 11% of the earth's diameter (1/777 = 0.13% of the earth's volume).

I showed them the picture, told them it was 860 miles, and even related it to the distance between 2 cities here which is about 900 miles, and then I asked them if the water were poured over the US, how deep it would reach.

Interestingly, now the answers were far too small, ranging from

1 foot (he later changed it to 3 feet)
to
4.5 miles

when in reality it is 90 miles.

The human mind definitely has trouble comprehending volume (and exponential growth too, which was also made clear by the answers to another question I asked them).

1/5/2011 5:28:14 PM

Cool story, bro.

1/5/2011 5:42:59 PM