Our fragile resources

I put this image together to show the relative volumes of the Earth, the Earth’s total water reserves (salt, fresh, vapor), and the accessible fresh water reserves. If you look at about five o’clock on the water sphere, you’ll see a smaller. That’s all the fresh water available for human use on our planet. It doesn’t look like much!

This is an adaptation of the image shown here, showing the relative volumes of the Earth’s total water reserves and atmosphere. The image of the Earth is from NASA.

I calculated the sphere representing the fresh water reserves based on the claim at globalchange.umich.edu that

“…of the world’s fresh water … ~0.007% … is accessible for direct human uses. This is the water found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped at an affordable cost. Only this amount is regularly renewed by rain and snowfall, and is therefore available on a sustainable basis.”

This figure is 0.0067% at USGS.

I apologize for the poor draftsmanship. I’d like to be able to do a more classy/glassy design, but that’s outwith my skills with Fireworks.5

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