Strategies for a Changing Planet: Water
Pale Blue Dot All the water on Earth would fill a sphere that was just 860 miles in diameter. Jack Cook/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution The amount of water on Earth is fixed, but everything else is changing fast Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive. If you combined all of the water in the planet's ice caps, glaciers, rivers, lakes, aquifers and oceans, it would fill a sphere 860 miles in diameter. That volume, some 366 million trillion gallons, hasn't changed in millennia, nor will it change in the foreseeable future. What will change, as the planet becomes hotter and more crowded, is where this water appears and in what stage of the hydrologic cycle. And those changes will present us with many oddly conflicting challenges. Even as rising sea levels threaten coastal cities, for...