Our limited resources

This image (it’s by Adam Nieman / Science Photo Library) was on BoingBoing. It’s a great way of appreciating how few resources we have. We all (six billion of us) breathe this same air and drink that same water.

Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometers of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.

Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

From Science Photo Library:

Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite 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 ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometers across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere.

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