Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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. [2][3][4] Because the oceans that cover roughly 70.8% of the area of Earth reflect blue light, Earth appears blue from space, and ...
The river pushes a vast plume of fresh water into the ocean. The plume is about 400 km (250 mi) long and between 100 and 200 km (62 and 124 mi) wide. The fresh water, being lighter, flows on top of the seawater, diluting the salinity and altering the colour of the ocean surface over an area up to 2,500,000 km 2 (970,000 sq mi) in extent. For ...
Fresh water makes up less than 3% of the world's water resources, and just 1% of that is readily available. Just 3% of it is extracted for human consumption. Agriculture uses roughly two thirds of all fresh water extracted from the environment. [1] [2] [3] Fresh water is a renewable and variable, but finite natural resource.
This article lists rivers by their average discharge measured in descending order of their water flow rate. Here, only those rivers whose discharge is more than 2,000 m 3 /s (71,000 cu ft/s) are shown. It can be thought of as a list of the biggest rivers on Earth, measured by a specific metric. For context, the volume of an Olympic-size ...
Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems. They include lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [1] They can be contrasted with marine ecosystems, which have a larger salt content. Freshwater habitats can be classified by different factors, including temperature, light penetration, nutrients, and ...
Out of all the water on Earth, saline water in oceans, seas and saline groundwater make up about 97% of it. Only 2.5–2.75% is fresh water, including 1.75–2% frozen in glaciers, ice and snow, 0.5–0.75% as fresh groundwater and soil moisture, and less than 0.01% of it as surface water in lakes, swamps and rivers.
Hydrosphere. The hydrosphere (from Ancient Greek ὕδωρ (húdōr) 'water' and σφαῖρα (sphaîra) 'sphere') [1][2] is the combined mass of water found on, under, and above the surface of a planet, minor planet, or natural satellite. Although Earth 's hydrosphere has been around for about 4 billion years, [3][4] it continues to change in ...
The Congo River, [ a ] formerly also known as the Zaire River, is the second-longest river in Africa, shorter only than the Nile, as well as the third-largest river in the world by discharge volume, following the Amazon and Ganges rivers.