Is there enough water in the ocean to cover all the land on earth? If so, how many feet of water, on average, would the land be submerged in? It would be 8.6 kilometers deep worldwide

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 Is there enough water in the ocean to cover all the land on earth? If so, how many feet of water, on average, would the land be submerged in?

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14 Answers

Dan Birchall

, lives in New England

Answered 7 years ago · Author has 7K answers and 10.9M answer views

Short answer: no.

Long answer: nooooo. Here are the reasons.

1. If it were possible to take all the water out of the ocean basins, put it onto land currently above sea level, and make it stay there, the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water in the oceans would cover the 150 million square kilometers of land to a depth of about 8.6 kilometers. Of course, it's not possible to make the water stay there - water flows downhill, and would naturally want to go right back into the ocean basins. So that's purely hypothetical.
2. On a less hypothetical note, if we were to melt all the polar icecaps and glaciers on Earth, the level of the oceans would go up a few hundred feet. This would inundate a lot of coastal or low-lying areas, but still wouldn't meet your goal of covering all the land. (This is your goal, right? You're some kind of mad scientist or evil genius arch-villain?)
3. Of course, you'll recall that water expands when it freezes, so you could cool all the water on the planet to, say, -5 celsius. (You can't just go to 0 celsius, since the salt in seawater keeps it from freezing for a few more degrees.) Since water expands about 9% when it freezes, 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water would yield 1.41 billion cubic kilometers of ice, or an extra 110 million cubic kilometers of ice. If you spread that ice evenly over the earth's 150 million square kilometers of land, it'd cover everything to a depth of about 730 meters. Of course, the ice would have no reason to spread evenly like that over uneven terrain, so it'd be more likely to fill in the lower-lying areas, while leaving tall hills and mountains sticking out. There's also one other catch - unless you were able to seriously violate the rules of physics, the surface of the ocean would freeze first, and once it froze to some not-so-great depth, further chilling the surface really wouldn't have much effect on the temperature of the water deeper in the ocean. It'd be like when a lake freezes in the winter - solid surface, but liquid underneath - and that would mean not having anywhere near as much ice to cover the land.

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