Global Impacts

Imagine, a big red, juicy apple. Now imagine this apple is our earth and the skin is the layer of soil and water that covers the planet.
¼ of the apple peel would be land, ¾ would be ocean.
The oceans cover ¾ of the planet. But only a fraction of this is productive and can support life.

Of all the oceans on the earth, 1/3200 of the earth's surface is the Photic Zone, or the top 100 metres of the ocean where light breaks through to support photosynthesis.

Of the ¼ of the remaining apple peel that represents land, half of that (1/8th) is deserts, swamps, mountains and Arctic and Antarctic regions. These areas do not grow food.

The other 1/8th of the apple peel is the remaining land that supports humans. This tiny wedge of our apple peel can be divided into four equal parts.

The first 1/32nd of the apple is rocky soil; the second 1/32nd of the apple is too wet to grow food; the third 1/32nd of the apple is too hot to produce food and the final 1/32nd of the apple is the land that we develop.

This teeny tiny 1/32nd of apple peel represents all the soil on the earth that we need to produce our food, provide our drinking water, extract the things we need to build our cities and towns, and absorb our wastes. All our drinking water comes from 3/100ths of one percent of the Earth's surface, or 1/3200 of the entire apple. Not much at all!!!

This lands supports:

Click http://desip.igc.org/populationmaps.html to see changing populations.

Visit http://www.wtamu.edu/~crobinson/DrDirt/wtamu_math_science04.html for lesson plans.

Information on this page is from http://www.nsta.org/main/news/pdf/sc0202_26.pdf