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How much water is on Earth?
Earth is special because it has so much water.
It’s in the ground, forms big oceans, and
it’s in our atmosphere.
It’s also in living things.
Your body is made up mostly of water.
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface.
And almost all of it—96.5 percent—is salt
water.
Salt water has different kinds of salt in
it, but it mostly has sodium chloride, the
same salt we add to our food.
Just 3.5 percent of the water on Earth is
fresh water we can drink.
And most of that fresh water, 68 percent,
is trapped in ice and glaciers.
A third of the fresh water is in the ground.
We call it groundwater.
The last two percent of fresh water is in
the rivers, lakes, and streams.
A very small amount is in our atmosphere,
where it exists as water vapor.
That’s what clouds are made of.
If you took all the water on Earth and put
it together it would be a ball 860 miles wide.
That’s a lot of water!
Find out more about our home planet at NASA
Space Place.
