Way back in 2003 I made picture of all the water in the world. I was curious to see it all together and a bit surprised when I’d done the calculation to see how small it looked. Many other people were surprised too. “That can’t be all the water” they’d tell me confidently, “That’s just the fresh water”. But no – all the water in the world could fit into a sphere 1,391 km across (864 miles).
The original 2003 image won a ‘Visions of Science’ award and is still popular in social media. But with current CGI tools I thought it would be good to create a new animated version that shows freshwater too. The large sphere is the total volume of all the water in the world: oceans; icecaps and glaciers; deep groundwater (750-4000 metres); shallow groundwater (< 750 metres); lakes; soil-moisture; atmosphere; rivers; biosphere.
The smaller spheres show the volumes of two subsets of freshwater. The combined total of all the volumes is greater than the total volume of water on Earth. The large sphere shows ALL of it and the small spheres show subsets.
All the water in the world was one of my first ‘concrete visualisations’. A concrete visualisation turns the usual process of visualisation on its head – instead of providing insight into data through abstraction, it provides insight by illustrating data as actual stuff. By some standards of data visualisation All the water in the world is pretty poor!At Real World Visuals we use the world itself as its own explanation. The total volume of water in all forms - fresh and salty - is 1,408.71 million km³. That’s equivalent to a sphere 1,377,973 metres in diameter.
We have been making pictures of water for many years. It is interesting to see the true scale of such an important component of our planet. Interesting too that much of that water was delivered to Earth by comets, who transported ice from much further out in the Solar System. See:
Resource efficiency in Asia Pacific
Volume in millions of cubic kilometres
Oceans: 1370
Icecaps and glaciers: 29
deep groundwater (750-4000 metres): 5.3
Shallow groundwater (< 750 metres): 4.2
Lakes: 0.125
Soil-moisture: 0.065
Atmosphere: 0.013
Rivers: 0.0017
Biosphere: 0.0006
Table adapted from Elizabeth Kay Berner and Robert A. Berner, 1987, The Global Water Cycle: Geochemistry and Environment, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J, Table 2.1, p 13
