Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS/illustration by Jack Cook, WHOI
In simplest terms, water makes up about 71% of the Earth's surface, while the other 29% consists of continents and islands.
To break the numbers down, 96.5% of all the Earth's water is contained within the oceans as salt water, while the remaining 3.5% is freshwater lakes and frozen water locked up in glaciers and the polar ice caps. Of that fresh water, almost all of it takes the form of ice: 69% of it, to be exact. If you could melt all that ice, and the Earth's surface was perfectly smooth, the sea levels would rise to an altitude of 2.7 km.
Read more at https://phys.org/news/2014-12-percent-earth.html#jCp
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