Where is our water stored?
We all depend on freshwater, but alas most of the world's water is salt water.
The graphic belows shows where most of the water is stored. A huge 97% (a bit more than 97 of the 100 blocks in the graphic) is located in the oceans and thus is salt water.
Ice caps and glaciers (think of the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica) store about 2% of the total and are our biggest storage place for freshwater.
Then, still noticeable, groundwater. Next to quite a bit of freshwater that is stored there, there are also major parts of the world (mostly close to seas and oceans)
where most of these waters are more or less salty (brackish water).
When you add all the storage places just mentioned, you have a small, small remainder of about 0.02% that is the total of lakes, rivers, rain, etc.
So, that part of the water that is most visible in daily life, is actually a very very small part of the total. See the small red dot in the graphic,
which represents all the water in all the lakes, rivers and in the air, of the whole world.
Percentage view of where water is located
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source: GeoHive.
note: each block above represents 1% of the world's water volume, of which the total is about 1,370,000,000km³. |