Earth, air and water

By Robin

The marble-like sphere on the left is the size all the water in the world would be if gathered up into a ball. The one on the right shows all the atmosphere gathered into a sphere at sea level atmospheric pressure. Both spheres are on the exact same scale as the Earth.

In the words of the Sting song “How fragile we are“.

earth_air_water.jpg

10 Responses to “Earth, air and water”

  1. mitz Says:

    you f*king idiots! of course it’s scary if you put it like that. the scale you are comparing things is totally wrong. Why don’t you have a sphere with the earths crust(i mean everything we can influence that is actually part of earth’s crust) i bet that would be a smaller sphere because we are very VERY thinly spread out on the earth compared to what is inside of it! wtf is wrong with you people, why are you trying to scare us like that?

  2. MAdd Says:

    Wow. Yeah…NOT!

    Did you account for all of the water trapped under the crust? Under the mantle?? In the polar ice caps???

    Don’t think so.

    WRONG!

  3. Grumpy Says:

    That is a f***ing HUGE sphere of water – it covers central Europe from Malta to the Baltic coast of Poland.

    That makes it a sphere of about 1,300 miles diameter. In other words, 1.15 BILLION cubic miles of water.

    And coincidentally about the same size as the planet Mercury.

    Pillocks.

  4. Robin Says:

    What I get out of these images is the sense of scale. It may be that the ball of water is over a billion cubic miles but you get a realisation for how small a percentage of our planet it is.

    The same for the atmosphere. Put this way you can picture exactly how much air there is and also get a feel for how we as a race maybe are causing climate change with greenhouse gasses.

    That’s why the post is in the ‘Just fancy that’ section. The picture doesn’t say anything scientific as such, think of it more like a work of art, intended to make you think…

    At least, that’s how I see it ;)

  5. propaganda Says:

    This comparison is so flawed its not even clever. Speaking of amount of water what about the huge underground aquifiers or the water in form of ice.

    Plus you do realize that since water is on the outside of the planet that it covers a larger surface area.

    This is so wrong it must be simple propaganda by an immoral environmetnalist, or a retarded earth scientist

  6. Paradox Says:

    Being only a mere student, I hope I won’t insult you with my amateur comments. xD Shouldn’t we display the air in relations to its volume of the average pressure? I’m pretty sure we have much more air than that seeing as “sea level atmospheric pressure” is way higher than that of the pressure nearer the fringes of the atmosphere. Just saying.

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  8. Erik Says:

    Nice pic, also nice would be to credit the original source?

  9. graceonline Says:

    Wow. That’s a lot of diatribe above. I found the images thought-provoking. What was your data source?

  10. Peter Simmons Says:

    Mitz, do you have a problem? No one used the word scary, yet you sound off with ‘of course it’s scary if you put it like that’, the only comment was – In the words of the Sting song “How fragile we are“. Whether that’s relevent to the picture may be questionable, but you appear to have come here to sound off at someone. If you’ve got issues, sort them out, don’t spread your anger round where it’s not warranted. If a picture like this scares you, perhaps you need some help.

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