All the Water and Air in the World

How much air and water is there on this planet? What would it look like if you collected all the world's air - or the world's water? See for yourself!

Water and air are the most precious substances we have, because without them, life on Earth would not exist. Sheepdrove's animations show you a new perspective on how truly limited these resources are.

 

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Water

Here you see all the world's water sucked up into a sphere. Next to the Earth, it looks very small indeed. This ball of blue represents all the sea, all the water in the polar icecaps, every glacier, every stream and river, all the lakes, and every puddle! And yet it is almost as if the water were no more than a lick of paint on the Earth's surface.

The total volume of our water is around 1.41 billion cubic kilometres. The total mass is about 1,410,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes. Yet our gigantic water ball would only shade a small area of a dried planet - perhaps Spain and France! How big is that...?

Air

All of the earth's atmosphere pulled together into a ball next to the planet looks much larger than the water, but remember these are gases. Here we represent the 5,140 trillion tonnes of air as if it were at sea-level pressure. In reality the atmosphere has lower pressure as you go higher up the 11 kilometres of air wrapped around the earth. (11km = 6.8 miles, or 36,000 foot approx.)

That's all folks!

What you see here is all we have, for everything on Earth. We tend to assume that the world holds endless amounts of air and water. In fact, it is easy to ruin such limited resources.

Every time we pollute our world's water and air, it is like throwing some away, because each dose of pollution the world less healthy for all living things... including you. We cannot afford to poison our planet.

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Acknowledgements

Dr Adam Neiman was the innovative education consultant to calculate and illustrate these sphere images. He used topographical data to work out the sizes of the water and air spheres. Image.

Nick Harris from splinter-group.net created these animations and images for Sheepdrove Organic Farm.