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 M¢25  Funded By Mahalo ? |  November 06, 2009 12:19 PM

Is there a calculation or estimate of how many gallons of water exist on planet earth?

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albanian albanian
 
 November 06, 2009 01:05 PM
Yes. Water is usually measured in cubic miles when you are talking about the whole planet.
1 cubic mile = 1.10111715 × 10 to the12th US gallons
There are about 332,500,000 cubic miles of water on Earth.
That makes 3.661214515 x 10 to the 20th US gallons.

I hope you are not asking because you are really thirsty. About 321,000,000 cubic miles of it is salt water in the oceans so the amount of fresh water is much more modest.

Source(s):
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleoceans.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=gallons+per+cubic+mi...
http://www.unitconversion.org/volume/cubic-miles-to-gallons-us-conversion.h...

Asker's Rating:
• Thanks for that! Sorry for not specifying salt or sweet water! Really, the reason I was asking for this is, oops, maybe another question coming up? How can human beings contaminate such a lot of water. It is really incredible!!! Or maybe it´s self-cleansing on such a grand scale. Well, must look into the matter further, you really got me going on this one!!!


Tags: water, measures

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konsiders konsiders
 
November 06, 2009 01:34 PM
332.5 cubic miles is 3.66121452 × 10 to the 14th gallons, but there are 332.5 million (10 to the 6th) cubic miles, so it should be 10 to the 20th gallons.

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albanian albanian
 
November 06, 2009 01:56 PM
Thank you for catching this. What happened is I pasted the ordinary American number 332,500,000 into the converter, presumably European, and it thought the coma was a decimal point. When I took out the comas it came out 10 to the 20.

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konsiders konsiders
 
November 06, 2009 12:41 PM
We've calculated the weight of the earth, and know the percentage of the earth that's water, so I know there are many ways to calculate it.

One website I found says there are 344 million cubic miles of water
1 mile cubed = 5280*5280*5280 feet cubed
1 cubic foot = 7.48051948 gallons

so there are 3.78784274 × 10 to the 20th gallons
or 378.7 ExaGallons.
Source(s):
http://www.lenntech.com/water-trivia-facts.htm


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konsiders konsiders
 
November 06, 2009 01:47 PM
It also seems these numbers will fluctuate depending on ice cap hold and cloud hold. But you've got a good estimate there. :)

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opher opher
 
November 06, 2009 02:53 PM
"We've calculated the weight of the earth, and know the percentage of the earth that's water, so I know there are many ways to calculate it" - the percentage of water on Earth that's quoted is not by weight or volume, but by surface area, so this is not the way to go.

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konsiders konsiders
 
November 06, 2009 03:55 PM
I don't know how the trivia page came up with their number. I was suggesting one way we could arrive at the total amount of water, surface area does sound like a simpler plan, that's probably how they did it.

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stanar stanar
 
November 06, 2009 05:45 PM
what about the water content in the form of ice caps, glaciers, atmospheric moisture, in the living organisms (we are made of 60% water), underground water?....

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konsiders konsiders
 
November 06, 2009 06:57 PM
I would guess living organisms are probably negligible considering the vastness of the ocean. Icecaps, too, I'd say. We're talking about 10 to the 20th gallons, and if you're using surface area to measure, the ice would displace the water they'd take up, more or less. The only one that would probably affect the total by a significant amount would probably be moisture in clouds, but I'd say it'd only raise the number by 10% or so since they don't cover all the atmospheric surface area of the earth and gasses are less dense than liquid.

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