Wow......

earthbound

Has anyone seen these pictures before? This is quite amazing, graphical representations of total water and air volumes of the earth. It's really hard to believe, puts it in across in such an interesting way.

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Global air volume. Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of air within the Earth's atmosphere, seen as a sphere, centred over Europe. It dramatically shows how finite the available air supply actually is. The sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. Although the atmosphere extends hundreds of kilometres above the Earth's surface, its density decreases progressively. Half of all the air in the atmosphere lies within the first 5 kilometres. Air is a mixture of gases that includes nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). The reminder is made up of argon, carbon dioxide, neon and helium.

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Global water volume. Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of the Earth's water, seen as a sphere, centred over North America. It dramatically shows how finite the water supply on Earth actually is. The sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. These figures were calculated by adding the volumes of water in the oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ground water and water in both ice caps and the atmosphere. The largest percentage (97%) of water is held in the oceans, with ice caps and glaciers accounting for a further 2%. The average depth of the ocean is 3.8 kilometres.

I still shake my head in disbelief when I look at these pictures. I saw it on QI tonight, pictures by Adam Nieman.

jdphish

EB, thanks for sharing that, pretty dang amazing.

The water just looks bigger all spread out.

I would like to see a sphere of human mass compared to the earth. Bet it would be much smaller than the ocean.

Very interesting stuff.

jdphish

I suppose I should have said human volume. Not mass.

Here's more food for thought. Humans don't take up much volume, all 6+ billion of us.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 925AALHDsF

SolTun

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/orders_mag.html

cut from thr link above:
Size of mankind

(Inspired by Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.)

What is the total volume of humanity? What is the radius of the smallest ball that would contain all of humanity, densely packed? (Try to give a rough estimate before reading what follows.)

Now that's an easy one. The volume of a typical human being is around 70 liters. Six billion human beings make therefore a volume of 400 million cubic meters. This is held in a ball of radius just over 450 meters.

Incidentally, if humanity were spread in surface rather than in volume, say at one person per square meter (this is not too uncomfortable), in a circle, that circle would have a radius of 44 kilometers: all of mankind would fit in a rather small island.

DéjàVoodoo

SolTun wrote:

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/orders_mag.html

cut from thr link above:
Size of mankind

(Inspired by Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.)

What is the total volume of humanity? What is the radius of the smallest ball that would contain all of humanity, densely packed? (Try to give a rough estimate before reading what follows.)

Now that's an easy one. The volume of a typical human being is around 70 liters. Six billion human beings make therefore a volume of 400 million cubic meters. This is held in a ball of radius just over 450 meters.

Incidentally, if humanity were spread in surface rather than in volume, say at one person per square meter (this is not too uncomfortable), in a circle, that circle would have a radius of 44 kilometers: all of mankind would fit in a rather small island.

That is a lot of BTUs....hope it is a cold island. I saw somewhere, that if you were to remove all the people from NY, then the average temp of the city would drop by 1/2 a degree.

jdphish

DéjàVoodoo wrote:

remove all the people from NY

Pure genius :twisted:

jdphish

Just kidding really. :shock:

Dave Donley

Very cool, really helps explain how humans can have a sizeable effect on the quality of the air and water.

scotty435

EB

Pretty neat. Any idea how they determined these? I got to thinking about the air one and thought, is this at standard temperature and pressure or did they just assume all the molecules were packed so tightly there was no space between them. Is it still air if it's a solid?

toddscat

New Yorkers full of hot air! Go figure.

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