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Comment by 557833 | Hacker News Reader

Lake Superior has enough water to flood all of North and South America to almost one foot.

Was intrigued by this comment so I looked it up.

North and South America have a surface area of about 42.55 million sq km or 4.58x10^14 sq ft (1 foot deep water is obviously 4.58x10^14 cubic feet).

Lake Superior has a volume of 12,100 cubic km or 4.2x10^14 cubic feet.

That's unbelievable!

now do the calculations on lake baikal.

About 8.12x10^14 cubic feet, so about 1.77 feet spread over all of the Americas.

What about Guarani Aquifer?

A little over 3 feet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(40,000+cubic+kilometre...

To skip ahead, the Great Artesian Basin, the largest artesian basin in the world, would be just over 5 feet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(64,900+cubic+kilometre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin

How much fracking liquid could we pump in there and remain profitable?

You're pumping in what's (loosely) soapy water to extract water. And in places where there's mostly positive pressure anyway.

None?

I like that Wolfram Alpha will just do this one for you:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+lake+superior...

It struggles with the more esoteric aquifers, and doesn't understand "North and South America" as an object, but still pretty cool.

But according to Wikipedia, Lake Superior has an average depth of 483 ft.

So take the area of the lake and multiply it by 483, and now it is not surprising that you can cover North+South America with it.

Yet another perspective: From http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html in 2010 306 billion gallons of fresh water per day used in the united states. Volume of Lake Superior is very roughly 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons.

V Lake Superior / (306 * 10^12 * 365) = 26.86 years

About 27 years of entire US water supply assuming no water cycle. Now that I do the math (hopefully I didn't screw it up), I'm not sure that's a big number or a small one actually.

Its big... take in account the inefficient water management that we have and that a martian colony would be numbered in the thousands, at best. This is basically unlimited reserves!

I read the post title and thought "huh that's all?". Then I read your comment!

Also puts into perspective just how much water there is on earth.

Here is another way to put it into perspective[0]: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/pictures/full-size/global-water-vo...

[0] - http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

Exactly the same here. Love it when something that is simply too large for comprehension is reframed in an easy to understand way.

That lake is not just huge, but crazy deep. It's bigger than the state of Maine in terms of area and in places is deeper than the Empire State Building is tall.

Or in other words, imagine turning Maine into a fishtank forty stories high that's full of fresh water.

Or... cover the surface of mars with ~ 3 inches (8 cm) of water.

Really puts into perspective how much water is in the great lakes!

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