Earth’s Water and Air
At left is a conceptual computer image of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink) relative to the size of the Earth. The image was created by Adam Nieman from Science Photo Library.
The spheres show how finite our water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometers across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers, as well as groundwater and water in the atmosphere.
The air sphere measures 1999 kilometers across and weighs 5140 trillion metric tons. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense, so half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometers of the atmosphere.
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