How Much Water

New Bern, NC
35 05.91 N 077 01.95 W

I love this picture. It is an ingenious way to illustrate how much waster is on Planet Earth.  If all our water were a sphere, it's radius would be 700 km.  That's about half the radius of the Moon.   Still, it looks tiny in this perspective.

To those of us who live on the the water and who sail the oceans, the amount of water seems nearly infinite.  Not so, as these clever people illustrated.

Illustration Credit & Copyright: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS

For more explanation about this remarkable picture, look here.

By the way, note how well this picture illustrates how wide the North American Continental shelf is along the USA East Coast.  That's why in most of our offshore sailing, we are still in water less than 100 feet deep.