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by giarc 3493 days ago

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!

3 comments

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

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.

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.

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

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?