Posted 5/19/2010 06:18:00 PM by Douglas

Are you like me? Have you been wondering all week how much water is in the ocean? Well sit back, enthaltards, I'm gonna school ya like a herd of mackerels.

A group of scientists used satellite measurements to get new estimates of these values, which turned out to be 0.3 billion cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers) for the volume of the oceans and 12,080.7 feet (3,682.2 meters) for the average ocean depth

Write that down, morons, there's gonna be a test later. And I know for a fact that some of you are still using 0.28 billion cubic miles of water in all you calculations. Wise up suckers. But how deep is it?

The depth estimate of 2.3 miles is about 69 to 167 feet (21 to 51 meters) less than previous estimates. (Some areas of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench (at nearly 7 miles or 11 km deep) are of course much deeper than the average, while other areas, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are shallower.)

Focus up. 2.3 miles is an average depth. Got it? It's not 2.3 miles deep everywhere, although it would make building sandcastles at the beach more interesting and bankrupt the waders industry.

But how good are these numbers? Can we trust them?

"If you want to know the water volume on the planet, you Google it and you get five different numbers, most of them 30- or 40-year-old values."

Dear god, it's worse than I thought. You can't just google something and believe the first thing it tells you? Quick, let's write a proposal to get some grant money to get the most accurate figure wasting other people's money can buy!

As long ago as 1888, for example, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate an ocean volume - the product of ocean area and mean ocean depth - just 1.2 percent greater than the figure reported by Charette and his colleague Walter H.F. Smith, a geophysicist at the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Wow, what a truly miraculous time to be alive! 130 years and several million in government grants and we're now an astounding 1.2% better than a Victorian fisherman with some string. Glory be to technology! But is this new number good enough? What if we wanted, nay, needed to echosound the entire ocean floor. I wonder how long that would take?

It would take a single ship 200 years (or 10 ships 20 years) to measure all the ocean-floor depths with an echsounder, according to published U.S. Navy estimates.

Hold on, I need to log onto a supercomputer at NORAD to do that calculation. Yep, 200 years for one ship is roughly equal to 20 years for 10 ships (I've truncated the rounding error). If my calculations are correct, and I pray to god they are, it would take almost a whole year if they had 198 or 199 echosounding ships. But I can't be sure until NASA sends the results back.