Aug 12, 2009 [b]: All of the water... all of the air

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by newtimer

That water one doesn't seem right. All of the water in the world would fill up a sphere whose diameter is roughly the width of France? That's it? The oceans cover most of this planet; and oceans are more than 4 cm deep.

According to wikipedia, the Pacific ocean alone has 10,803,873,000,000 cubic kilometers of water. That's either 10 times more or 1 millions times more than what the picture shows for all of Earth's water (depending on whether you define a billion as a thousand-million or a million-million).

Either way, somebody's math was way off here. I suspect they looked at the surface area and confused it for the volume.

Methinks Wiki must have it wrong. (I know, blasphemy and sacrelige!)

To get 10,803,873,000,000 cubic km, you need:
1,000,000 km wide
by
1,000,000 km long
by
10.803973 km deep.

While 10 km does approximate the deepest parts of the ocean (still not allowing for the "shallow" areas), there aint no way it is 10 million km across.

The sphere on the picture looks about right to me; remember the oceans are (comparitively) just a very shallow layer smeared around the surface.

I haven't found the wiki source article, but I suspect someone incorrectly converted cubic metres to cubic kilometres.
Linear kilometre = 1,000 linear metres.
Square kilometre = 1,000,000 square metres.
Cubic kilometre = 1,000,000,000 cubic metres.
I guess they had cubic metres and just divided by 1,000.