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There are about 332.5 million cubic miles of water on Earth. How many cubic miles of Earth's water is freshwater?
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There are about 10 million cubic miles of freshwater on Earth. About two-thirds of this is frozen and stored in Earth's icecaps and glaciers.
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How much freshwater is frozen in icecaps and glaciers?
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The lakes on Earth hold 42,320 cubic miles of water. Of this, 20,490 cubic miles are saline. The rest are freshwater. What percent of the water in lakes is freshwater?
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To find the percent of Earth's lake water that is freshwater, divide the amount of freshwater in lakes by the total amount of water that is in lakes.
About 51.6% of the water in Earth's lakes is freshwater.
Salt lakes are formed when water containing salt flows into a lake that has no outlets. When the amount of water that flows into the lake is less than the amount of evaporation, the dissolved salts are left behind and the land is known as a salt flat. The Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah are the result of the evaporation of the ancient Lake Bonneville. Some of the larger salt lakes in the world include the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, Lake Balkhash, and the Great Salt Lake.
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Ground water accounts for about 5.6 million cubic miles of water. What percent of Earth's water is underground?
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Suppose climate change causes some of the icecaps and glaciers to melt, adding 6000 cubic miles of freshwater to the surface water. Use percent to describe the increase in surface water.
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From Exercise 13, you know that there are about 9,975,000 cubic miles of freshwater on Earth. From the graph above, you can see that 0.3% of Earth's freshwater is surface water.
If the melting of icecaps and glaciers added 6000 cubic miles to this surface water, then that would be a percent change of
This would be a significant change in Earth's fresh surface water.
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What effect would a significant increase in surface water have on Earth and its inhabitants?
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One of the categories in the graph is "Other." Where else do you think you can find freshwater besides the categories shown?
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Earth's water occurs as:
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Oceans
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Icecaps and Glaciers
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Ground water (wells, aquifers)
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Surface water (rivers, lakes, ponds, wet lands, streams)
What else is there? The answer is that water also occurs in the atmosphere and in the bodies of plants and animals.
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How do you think scientists estimated that there are about 332.5 million cubic miles of water on Earth?
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