This is just water under the layers, right? Wasn't there an ocean of water trapped inside crystals underground like ringwoodite? I bet if all that water comes out, Earth will look like Waterworld.
The droughts in recent years have had a big influence on the level of ground water. I heard on the radio a year ago that it will take for it to rain every day for the whole year, for it to recover to the usual level, at least in my area. And that it will only get worse as the climate is getting hotter, and the water evaporates at a faster rate.
Seeing how many here are having fun with the choice of units, here's a puzzle:
Assuming the Moore's law holds, how long will we have to wait before there are more transistors in a chip the size of a 8086 processor than moles of water in Earth's crust (the choice of time unit is left to the student) ?
10 million cubic miles of water is 4.2*10^22 ml or the same number in grams. The molecular weight of water is 18 g/mol, so dividing that out gets us 2.3*10^21 moles of water in the Earth's crust.
According to a quick 'n dirty Google search, in 2024 chips can have up to 208 billion transistors. This leaves us with a 1.1*10^10 improvement needed to hit our target, which works out to be about 33 doublings. Moore's law says one doubling happens every 1.5 years, so we're looking at a 50 year timeline.
Assuming Moore's law can hold for another 50 years is likely pushing it, but it's cool to see that if we manage to duplicate the last 50 years of progress we'll be approaching a mole of transistors per chip.
Any normal measurement unit here is going to be hard to grasp on it's own without translating it into an equivalency; XXXXXX olympic swimming pools or XX Y ocean.
The title was in suspended animation so I added the answer from the article. The article is trying to make its primary audience, the Americans, easier by converting it to miles.
I'm an American, and I like to think that I can comprehend liters, but I think for enormous volumes like this it's easier to visualize distances cubed.
Like for a million cubic miles, I know that's a cube with 1,000 mile sides. That's like New York to Miami (don't ask me about cities in Europe...okay I'll go out on a limb: Paris to Rome?). I can visualize that cube of water on a globe.
But how many liters or gallons is that? A lot! But billions? Trillions? I probably would instinctively say billions, but with a tiny bit of mental arithmetic I'm suspecting it's up in the trillions.
edit: I came back to confess that indeed I am an ignorant American who has no intuitive sense of exaliters. My SI volume comfort zone doesn't extend much past teraliters.
But everyone knows how long a mile is, and can imagine a cube one mile long one mile wide and one mile high. Though we can't truly grasp the scale, we can at least understand the magnitude of a value of ~ten million.
But quoting a value of 4.4 x 10^19 liters is meaningless for most people.
"Of course, that's 22,000,000,000,000,000,000 two-liter soda bottles!"
So cubic miles seems like a reasonable unit for this pop-science article, despite the fact that you likely wouldn't use it in a published journal article.
Yeah. Long. I doubt most people can eyeball something in the distance and say with accuracy "yeah that is about a mile away" because a mile is really long and people are bad at estimating things. Now do it for 10 miles.
A relatable example like someone has mentioned "its about 10 dead seas worth" would have been a better play.
I’d guess a lot of Americans can look at a globe and eyeball 100 miles or 1,000 miles. At least American adults with a lot of driving experience. When you get into the millions of cubic miles of water, I think the best way to visualize it is a cube sitting next to the globe.
The fact that a site called "worldatlas" uses antiquated (and in this case, meaningless) U.S. units, tells you all you need to know about internet bias towards a US audience. Fun fact: there are ~1 billion English speakers outside of the U.S.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Like this one: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/15/322246690...