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| Description: When you look at an image of Earth, it's easy to understand that 70% of its surface is covered with water. This is because all that blue you see is water in the oceans - about 97% of all the water on Earth! Ocean water is very salty, much too salty for us to drink, so in the oceans it stays. That leaves only about 3% for all other water on Earth, which is all freshwater. But even most of that is not available to us! Of that 3%, 2/3 of it (so about 68% of all the freshwater, which is about 2% of all the total water on Earth) is frozen in ice caps and glaciers. While this may sound like an untapped resource, it's actually beneficial to us that this water is frozen where it is because it helps regulate sea levels and global temperatures on Earth. So we still have 1% of all the water on Earth left to distribute. About 30% of Earth's freshwater (approximately 0.6% of all water on Earth) is found as groundwater. This is one resource we do take advantage of - it's where we get much of our water for drinking and irrigating agricultural crops. Surface water, which is all the lakes, rivers and streams on Earth, makes up about 0.3% of all the freshwater (about 0.009% of all water on Earth). Think about all the large rivers we have on our planet, like the Nile, the Amazon, the Colorado and the Mississippi. All of these rivers and all of their streams don't even add up to 1% of Earth's total water! And what's even more amazing is that of all the surface water, rivers make up a measly 2%. Most surface water is found in lakes, which constitute more than 85% of all surface water. Picture Stats: Views: 656 Filesize: 361.38kB Height: 527 Width: 528 Source: https://biology-forums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=42724 |