Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of water facts. We primarily deal with salt water pools but, Eli has rounded up information from all over the web to bring you world water facts. VIEW ON THE WORLD ===============
- If all the world’s water were fit into a gallon jug, the fresh water available for us to use would equal only about one tablespoon
- More than 2 billion people on earth do not have a safe supply of water.
- 748 million people in the world do not have access to an improved source of drinking water
- 5 billion people do not have use of an improved sanitation facility.
- Some 1.8 billion people worldwide drink water that is contaminated with feces.
- Groundwater supplies serve about 80% of the population, whereas up to 4% of usable groundwater is already polluted.
- Of all the water on earth, only 2.5% is fresh water. Fresh water is either groundwater (0,5%), or readily accessible water in lakes, streams, rivers, etc. (0,01%).
- As oceans are very wide and there are multiple to be found on earth, oceans store most of the earth’s water. This is apparently 97% of the total amount of water on earth, 2% of which is frozen.
- Most of the earth’s surface water is permanently frozen or salty. The water found in the Earth’s lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, swamps, etc accounts for only 0.3 percent of the world’s fresh water. The rest is trapped in glaciers or is in the ground.
- There is more water in the atmosphere than in all of our rivers combined.
- If all of the water vapor in our planet’s atmosphere fell as water at once and spread out evenly, it would only cover the globe with about an inch of water.
- The World Health Organization recommends 2 gallons per person daily to meet the requirements of most people under most conditions; and around 5 gallons per person daily to cover basic hygiene and food hygiene needs.
- In developing nations women and girls are primarily responsible for collecting water; on average, 25 percent of their day is spent on this task.
- Collectively, South African women and children walk a daily distance equivalent to 16 trips to the moon and back to fetch water.
- Most of the world’s people must walk at least 3 hours to fetch water.
- Today, at least 400 million people live in regions with severe water shortages.
- Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Macchiavelli once came up with a plan to use water to win a war, by diverting the river Arno. Da Vinci was obsessed with water; he drew its vortices endlessly. He also worked out a lot of the science of how it flows, well before the field of fluid dynamics was established.
Sources: http://ctwa.us/reports/Trivia.htm http://water.org/water-crisis/water-sanitation-facts/ https://www.unicef.org/media/media_81329.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs391/en/ https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301608420_Water_-_A_Key_Driving_Force https://themeaningofwater.com/2016/02/25/weird-water-facts/ http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/gender.shtml http://www.gender.cawater-info.net/what_is/facts_e.htm