The breakdown of the world’s water content

  • Author(s)
    Parrys Raines
  • Category
    Science
  • Published
    06 April 2010
  • Read time
    2 minutes

I found these statistics on the UN water website.

75% of planet earth is covered in water.
97.5% of this is ocean.
Which leaves 2.5% as fresh water.
70% of this is ice.
Which leaves 30% as groundwater we can get access to.
Much of that is so polluted it’s unusable, which leaves less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. We use 70% for irrigation and about 22% for industry so that leaves us about 0.08% for domestic use.

Climate change may cause changes in our water sources so it is important to for us to learn how we can preserve as much of it as possible.