Earth's Fresh Water (2024)

FAQs

Earth's Fresh Water? ›

3% of the earth's water is fresh. 2.5% of the earth's fresh water is unavailable: locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and soil; highly polluted; or lies too far under the earth's surface to be extracted at an affordable cost. 0.5% of the earth's water is available fresh water.

Only about three percent of Earth's water is fresh water. Of that, only about 1.2 percent can be used as drinking water; the rest is locked up in glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost, or buried deep in the ground. Most of our drinking water comes from rivers and streams.

Most of Earth's fresh water is locked in ice

Over 96% of Earth's water is saline (salty) and found in the ocean. Only a little over 3% of Earth's water is fresh. Most of that fresh water (68.7%) is frozen in glaciers and ice caps.

Over 97 percent of the earth's water is found in the oceans as salt water. Two percent of the earth's water is stored as fresh water in glaciers, ice caps, and snowy mountain ranges. That leaves only one percent of the earth's water available to us for our daily water supply needs.

Due to human consumption and natural causes, the world's supply of fresh water is dwindling at an alarming rate. Scientists predict that if we don't work to slow down freshwater depletion, our planet will become uninhabitable by 2048.

About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water.

Ice sheets

Around 60% of the world's total fresh water (90% of the world's surface fresh water) is held in the ice sheet, equivalent to a 70m rise in global sea level. In East Antarctica the ice sheet rests on a major land mass, but in West Antarctica the bed is, in places, more than 2,500m below sea level.

While there are a few places that boast extremely clean water, such as Canada, Iceland, Antarctica, or even Upstate New York, the team of scientists determined that the cleanest water in the world was in the Patagonia region of Chile, Puerto Williams.

This makes groundwater the largest active freshwater resource on the planet. Groundwater is often referred to as a hidden resource, as it is not often seen and is hard to visualise. Water is stored between pores in the rock, or in fractures, known as aquifers.

Brazil has highest freshwater resources in the world which is accounts for approximately 12% of the world's freshwater resources. It is just because Amazon region this country contains 70% of the total freshwater. Russia has second largest freshwater reserve which is approximately 1/5 of freshwater in the world.

Why is so little of Earth's water available for human use? ›

2.5% of the earth's fresh water is unavailable: locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and soil; highly polluted; or lies too far under the earth's surface to be extracted at an affordable cost.

The majority of fresh water is actually found underground as soil moisture and in aquifers. Groundwater can feed the streams, which is why a river can keep flowing even when there has been no precipitation. Humans can use both ground and surface water.

Nearly 97% of the Earth's water is unsuitable for consumption by humans primarily because it is too salty. The vast majority of the planet's water is found in the oceans as saltwater, making it undrinkable without undergoing desalination, which is an energy and resource-intensive process.

The water on our Earth today is the same water that's been here for nearly 5 billion years. So far, we haven't managed to create any new water, and just a tiny fraction of our water has managed to escape out into space. The only thing that changes is the form that water takes as it travels through the water cycle.

By 2050, the researchers estimate some 3,061 sub-basins will be at risk of water scarcity from quantity or quality, covering an extra 3 billion people than quantity estimates alone, with nitrogen-driven water scarcity hotspots in China, South Asia, Europe, the United States and Brazil.

The oceans constitute 97.3% of all water sources on the Earth. Thus, the percentage of freshwater sources is only 2.7%. Of all the freshwater sources, only 2.9% of it is available to us in the form of freshwater lakes, rivers, and groundwater.

Just 3.5 percent of the water on Earth is fresh water we can drink. And most of that fresh water, 68 percent, is trapped in ice and glaciers.

In adult men, about 60% of their bodies are water. However, fat tissue does not have as much water as lean tissue. In adult women, fat makes up more of the body than men, so they have about 55% of their bodies made of water.

Of all the water found on Earth, 97.3% is saltwater contained in oceans which is not suitable for direct human consumption. Rest 2.7% is freshwater, out of which 68.7% are ice sheets and glaciers and 30.1% is groundwater.