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The total volume of water on Earth is estimated at 1.386 billion km 3 (333 million cubic miles), with 97.5% being salt water and 2.5% being freshwater. Of the freshwater, only 0.3% is in liquid form on the surface.
About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water. Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog.
Earth's water is (almost) everywhere: above the Earth in the air and clouds, on the surface of the Earth in rivers, oceans, ice, plants, in living organisms, and inside the Earth in the top few miles of the ground. For an estimated explanation of where Earth's water exists, look at this bar chart.
Earth’s oceans contain 97% of the planet’s water, so just 3% is fresh water, water with low concentrations of salts. Most fresh water is trapped as ice in the vast glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland.
About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water. Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog.
Water Distribution. The total volume of water on Earth is estimated at 1.386 billion km 3 (333 million mi 3), with 97.5% being salt water and 2.5% being fresh water. Of the fresh water, only 0.3% is in liquid form on the surface (USGS 2016; Eakins and Sharman 2010; Gleick 1993).
Although water covers about 70 percent of Earth's surface, only a small percentage of that water is freshwater, and even less of that is easily accessible to the billions of organisms that depend on freshwater for survival.
The Earth holds about 326 million trillion gallons (326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons) of water [1]. If you crunch the numbers, here’s the percentage in global water distribution of all these sources of water.
(Earle, 2019) Because Earth’s water is present in all three states, it can get into various environments around the planet. The movement of water around the Earth’s surface is the hydrologic (water) cycle. Water changes from a liquid to a gas by evaporation to become water vapor.
Distribution of Earth’s Water | Physical Geography. Earth’s oceans contain 97% of the planet’s water, so just 3% is fresh water, water with low concentrations of salts. Most fresh water is trapped as ice in the vast glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland.