Water--Cool, Clear, Water

An alien race looking at the Earth from space would classify our Earth as a water planet, nearly 70% of its surface is covered by water and we human inhabitants are 60% water. Unfortunately for thirsty Earthlings, all but 0.3% is too salty to use. To put that in a way I can understand, if ten glasses of water represented all the water on Earth, only one-third of one of the glasses would represent all the fresh water we have. Considering there are now over six billion humans and counting, each of us shares fewer and fewer amounts of drinkable water.

So what kinda numbers are we talking about? Well, there are about two billion cubic miles of fresh water, mostly in lakes, rivers and ground water. Ground water is water that is underground and usually available by wells or springs.

If we distribute the fresh water equally among the six billion or so people alive today it comes out to about 330 million gallons each. Of course, a lot of the fresh water is used by industry, washing cars, taking showers and all the stuff we use fresh water for besides drinking.

The World Health Organization states that each person needs 264,000 gallons per year or about 700 gallons per day for basic human needs. That comes out to 1,500,000,000,000 gallons per year or one and a half trillion gallons.

In the U.S each of us personally uses twice the world average and we use 408 billion gallons each DAY for all purposes. Over one- fourth of that amount is used by only three states, California, Florida and Texas.

So, it is pretty obvious that somebody is going get pretty thirsty, by 2025 it is estimated that 48 countries, 22 of them sub-Saharan, will be critically short of fresh water.

Next week we'll talk about how fresh water gets recycled and how we can make more of 'the new liquid gold'.