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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.
Fresh water is the water resource that is of the most and immediate use to humans. Fresh water is not always potable water, that is, water safe to drink by humans. Much of the earth's fresh water (on the surface and groundwater) is to a substantial degree unsuitable for human consumption without treatment.
Name Location Volume Maximum Depth notes 1: Lake Superior: Michigan - Minnesota - Ontario - Wisconsin: 9,799,680,000 acre⋅ft (12,088 km 3) 1,332 ft (406 m) Third-largest fresh-water lake in the world by volume
Freshwater lakes contain about 87% of this fresh surface water, including 29% in the African Great Lakes, 22% in Lake Baikal in Russia, 21% in the North American Great Lakes, and 14% in other lakes. Swamps have most of the balance with only a small amount in rivers, most notably the Amazon River. The atmosphere contains 0.04% water.
Freshwater ecosystem. Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems that include the biological communities inhabiting freshwater waterbodies such as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [1] They can be contrasted with marine ecosystems, which have a much higher salinity. Freshwater habitats can be ...
This article lists lakes with a water volume of more than 100 km 3, ranked by volume.The volume of a lake is a difficult quantity to measure. [1] Generally, the volume must be inferred from bathymetric data by integration.
Water resources are natural resources of water that are potentially useful for humans, for example as a source of drinking water supply or irrigation water. These resources can be either freshwater from natural sources, or water produced artificially from other sources, such as from reclaimed water or desalinated water (). 97% of the water on Earth is salt water and only three percent is fresh ...
The Great Lakes contain 21% of the world's surface fresh water: 5,472 cubic miles (22,810 km 3), or 6.0×10 15 U.S. gallons, that is 6 quadrillion U.S. gallons, (2.3×10 16 liters). The lakes contain about 84% of the surface freshwater of North America; [ 48 ] if the water were evenly distributed over the entire continent's land area, it would ...