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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

The article has a strong focus on "available to humans" and "that humans depend on". Many of the water beneath the crust is exactly that, pumping it up is an important source of drinking water. (In my country, the Netherlands, it's the primary, almost only, source of drinking water)

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The Netherlands doesn't pump water from beneath the crust! Groundwater is included in the larger freshwater sphere. Water in the mantle would be an additional sphere (not sure if it's freshwater or saltwater).

TIL. I did not get that that from the article. Thanks for correcting me.

I simply presumed that water that's pumped from layers 100m or lower below the surface, water that's sometimes 10.000 years "old", wasn't surface water. But it makes sense to lump it in there too.

The crust is about 40km thick. The deepest anyone has ever dug is ~12km[0]. It is quite weird to think we live on this crust which has a gigantic mass inside that we can't get to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

If you think that's weird, you'll love this. Go look at another human. There's a skeleton in there!

An interesting point, perhaps it's just me, but my initial reaction to this was that, for purposes of comparison, the volume of "usable" or maybe inhabitable land be measured instead, as opposed to the volume of the entire planet including mantle, core, etc. this graphic seems very prone to misinterpretation and usage as a memetic weapon against globalization, as it is.

It's similarly misleading to color coding a map of a nation's or a region's land area to show how the people who occupy various parts of that land area voted in an election. The graphic representation tells a story about the land that deceptively implies facts about the people that are not true.

I completely agree with you. Let's add to the fact that volume, being three-dimensional, is being represented on two dimensions (graphics on a computer screen), which might cause some loss of perspective, fundamental for comparison. Perhaps a better way to represent it would have been the volume of inhabitable land (as you suggest) vs the volume of available water but extrapolated to two dimensions?

It does separate liquid fresh water from surface lakes and rivers which makes me believe the middle ball includes reasonably accessible ground water.

My read is that the two smaller spheres are non-exclusive, and that the smallest is included in the 2nd.

The breakout is for comparison: surface freshwater (total) and surface freshwater (lakes and rivers) relatively.

Yes they're pretty clearly subsets of each other. There's a better graphic on this page: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci... Direct link: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...

That one actually has percentages on the subsets too for interesting differences like glacier and icecap volume vs ground water (which I think still excludes the kind of deep mantle water mentioned up thread because it's not usably extractable).

PFAS have reportedly contaminated water everywhere on Earth including the water in springs, confined aquifers, and even the rain that falls.

Is the water pumped from beneath the crust in the Netherlands poisoned too or have you guys got the last of the good stuff?

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