I'm an American, and I like to think that I can comprehend liters, but I think for enormous volumes like this it's easier to visualize distances cubed.
Like for a million cubic miles, I know that's a cube with 1,000 mile sides. That's like New York to Miami (don't ask me about cities in Europe...okay I'll go out on a limb: Paris to Rome?). I can visualize that cube of water on a globe.
But how many liters or gallons is that? A lot! But billions? Trillions? I probably would instinctively say billions, but with a tiny bit of mental arithmetic I'm suspecting it's up in the trillions.
edit: I came back to confess that indeed I am an ignorant American who has no intuitive sense of exaliters. My SI volume comfort zone doesn't extend much past teraliters.
But everyone knows how long a mile is, and can imagine a cube one mile long one mile wide and one mile high. Though we can't truly grasp the scale, we can at least understand the magnitude of a value of ~ten million.
But quoting a value of 4.4 x 10^19 liters is meaningless for most people.
"Of course, that's 22,000,000,000,000,000,000 two-liter soda bottles!"
So cubic miles seems like a reasonable unit for this pop-science article, despite the fact that you likely wouldn't use it in a published journal article.
Yeah. Long. I doubt most people can eyeball something in the distance and say with accuracy "yeah that is about a mile away" because a mile is really long and people are bad at estimating things. Now do it for 10 miles.
A relatable example like someone has mentioned "its about 10 dead seas worth" would have been a better play.
I’d guess a lot of Americans can look at a globe and eyeball 100 miles or 1,000 miles. At least American adults with a lot of driving experience. When you get into the millions of cubic miles of water, I think the best way to visualize it is a cube sitting next to the globe.
Like for a million cubic miles, I know that's a cube with 1,000 mile sides. That's like New York to Miami (don't ask me about cities in Europe...okay I'll go out on a limb: Paris to Rome?). I can visualize that cube of water on a globe.
But how many liters or gallons is that? A lot! But billions? Trillions? I probably would instinctively say billions, but with a tiny bit of mental arithmetic I'm suspecting it's up in the trillions.
edit: I came back to confess that indeed I am an ignorant American who has no intuitive sense of exaliters. My SI volume comfort zone doesn't extend much past teraliters.