Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Most water in Earth's atmosphere and crust comes from saline seawater, while fresh water accounts for nearly 1% of the total. The vast bulk of the water on Earth is saline or salt water, with an average salinity of 35‰ (or 3.5%, roughly equivalent to 34 grams of salts in 1 kg of seawater), though this varies slightly according to the amount of runoff received from surrounding land.
Water can be polluted, abused, and misused but it is neither created nor destroyed, it only migrates. There is no evidence that water vapor escapes into space." [12]: 26 Every year the turnover of water on Earth involves 577,000 km 3 of water. This is water that evaporates from the oceanic surface (502,800 km 3) and from land (74,200 km 3).
While the majority of Earth's surface is covered by oceans, those oceans make up just a small fraction of the mass of the planet. The mass of Earth's oceans is estimated to be 1.37 × 10 21 kg, which is 0.023% of the total mass of Earth, 6.0 × 10 24 kg.
When Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago, some water likely existed in that gas and dust — though much of it would have been vaporized by the sun’s intense heat. How Earth got so much ...
The entire ocean, containing 97% of Earth's water, spans 70.8% of Earth's surface, [8] making it Earth's global ocean or world ocean. [23] [25] This makes Earth, along with its vibrant hydrosphere a "water world" [43] [44] or "ocean world", [45] [46] particularly in Earth's early history when the ocean is thought to have possibly covered Earth ...
This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all of Earth's water is contained in its global ocean, covering 70.8% of Earth's crust. The remaining 29.2% of Earth's crust is land, most of which is located in the form of continental landmasses within Earth's land hemisphere.
The search for water in space. Water is one of the most common molecules found across the universe, and for years, astronomers have included water detection as a larger part of the search for life ...
As of December 2015, the confirmed liquid water in the Solar System outside Earth is 25–50 times the volume of Earth's water (1.3 billion km 3), [10] i.e. about 3.25–6.5 × 10 10 km 3 (32.5 to 65 billion km 3) and 3.25–6.5 × 10 19 tons (32.5 to 65 billion billion tons) of water.