When it comes to fresh water “reserves,” there is no competing with Greenland. You can drink some of its bottled water from the ice sheet for a mere $52 per bottle. Below are the volumes of fresh water, in millions of cubic kilometers:
Total worldwide: ~40.0
Antarctic ice sheets: ~24.7
Groundwater: ~12.0
Greenland ice sheet: ~2.9
Glaciers and ice-caps: ~0.1
Lakes, ponds and rivers: ~0.1
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Taking other resources as a comparison, Saudi Arabia sits on 263 billion barrels of proven reserves of crude oil, or 18% of the world’s total. China has 55 million tons of rare earth ores, or 50% of the world’s proven reserves. And the Congo’s 45,000 tons of cobalt are about 43% of the world’s total. Greenland, a self-governing “amt” under the Danish crown with a population of 56,000: excluding Antarctica, it owns fully 94% of the world’s above-ground fresh water.
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Greenland is an island with an area of 2.2 million square kilometers. This is about the size of Mexico. (Or Texas). It has been covered for the last 3 million years by an ice sheet averaging about 1.2 miles high which contains 2.9 million cubic kilometers of frozen fresh water.
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This summer, NASA satellites run out of the Goddard Center in Maryland found that 97 percent of the surface went into melt, the highest fraction found since 1889.
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University of Denmark climatologists’ computer models suggest that an increase of 3 degrees Celsius would be enough to melt it off, halving its volume over the next 500 years and melting it all within 2000 years. Such an event would raise world sea levels by about 24 feet, or 7 meters, and drain about 95 percent of the world’s accessible fresh water into the sea.
Source. Progressive Economy
