The One Minute Geographer: This Fragile Earth (11) Water, Water Everywhere and Only a Drop to Drink

Jim Fonseca
2 min readFeb 25, 2022
Image from ga.water.usgs.gov

Speaking of the hydrosphere (previous post), Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It contains the line “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” A sailor shot an albatross with an arrow and now the ship’s crew is dying of thirst. Maybe we can think of Coleridge as an early environmentalist because he published the poem in 1798.

From the two diagrams shown above and below, here are the basics:

The large ball of water represents the size of all the water on earth.

· 97% of the big ball is salt water — we can’t drink it or use it for agriculture

· 3% of the big ball is fresh water. That’s the small ball over Kentucky. But guess what?

· 70% of that 3% is permanently frozen water in ice caps and glaciers, mostly in Antarctica and Greenland

· Half of the freshwater that isn’t frozen is groundwater that is out of our reach by depth or by location

· The bottom line: Only 1% of the world’s freshwater is accessible to humans in lakes, rivers and upper-level ground water. That even counts clouds, water vapor and rain falling here and there right now. That’s the tiny dot of water on the…

--

--

Jim Fonseca

Geography professor (retired) writes The One Minute Geographer featuring This Fragile Earth. Top writer in Transportation and, in past months, Travel.