Leaving 35% untouched and uninhabited by humans. Dynamic land cover maps include transitions of land cover classes over time and hence captures land cover changes. Brazil . But just how much water exists on, in, and above our planet? Land cover classes can usually be discriminated by characteristic patterns using remote sensing. Did you actually write this? Russia, and 5. The maps are also critical for scientists as they study changes in the Earth system and as they model the Earth system. km) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (sq. Historical land cover data for the years 1500–2005 are based on HYDE 3.1 and future land cover projections for the period 2006–2100 came from four Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) scenarios which reach different levels of radiative forcing by year 2100: MESSAGE (8.5 W/m2), AIM (6 W/m2), GCAM (4.5 W/m2), and IMAGE (2.6 W/m2). buffalo grazing on rangeland. What is an example of a continental divergent boundary? 2. So on the one hand, you could say from these results that 10% of Earth is inhabited by humans. Doing some writing research and this is usual :O, We should convert sea water into sweat water and we should make canals for providing water in all deserts of the world and that area where rocky barren land where we put arable sand in this way our earth can support 40 billion people. How much farmable land is left of Earth, and it’s suitability – There is still some farmable land left on Earth, but there could be challenges in accessing it, challenges in trying to farm on it. Subtracting this uninhabitable 57% (32,665,981 mi 2 ) from the total land area leaves 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres of habitable land. DataBank. All you have to do to get a correct answer to this dispute is to look out the window on a flight from east to west coast of North America. Learn how your comment data is processed. This is down from the pre-industrial area of 5.9 billion hectares. “90% of Earth is covered by humans”! China, 4. km) Urban land area (sq. Rural land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (% of total land area) Land area (sq. This can include clearing the … Nasa Usgs Mission Helps What Is A Forest. We simply do NOT know the answers to even apparently “simple” questions that “can” (might) be answered by “science.”. 1992 data are primarily based on unsupervised classification of Landsat data, while the rest of the images rely on the imperviousness data layer for the urban classes and on a decision-tree classification for the rest. No matter how you measure it, humans are a SMALL percentage of what goes on on earth. Being 3500 square miles in size, it is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. So this means that out of 1000 units of land, we occupy three. Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Ultimately there is no one right answer to this question since there are many ways to interpret it – I tried to present a number of different ways of looking at the same question and provide some kind of answer to each. Earth’s surface is about 500 million km2, but most of that (70.8%) is water, which we’re not really very good at. Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy the article. I kept in my mind this. What is the largest land biome? It is interesting to note that of Earth's freshwater sources, about 69% is in icecaps and glaciers (NOAA). Or you could take a more glass half-empty view and say that 90% of Earth is covered by humans – either populated or connected with an ever-expanding network of roads, train tracks, highways, farms and industrial land. Already a member? km) Download . We’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for our End-of-Year sale—Join Now! It’s unfortunate that you don’t understand the discrepancy. Using data from 1970 to 2000, the researchers then tried to project future urban land cover change – their results predict that global urban landcover will increase by a further 1.5 million km2 by 2030. Give an example of divergent boundary. Not only that, but of that 2.5 percent, more than two-thirds is locked away in glaciers and not particularly able to help meet the growing demands of society. Hot air goes up and leaves the vacuum under it, which is filled by cold air again. Twenty-nine percent of Earth is land, and seventy-one percent is water. In the year 2000, estimates suggest that globally, urban land covered somewhere between 700,000 and 3.5 million km2 – but that’s a pretty big margin of error. In the visualization we see the breakdown of global land area today. Land Cloud Cover, which is also included, is determined by calculating the percentage of clouds over land-only pixels in a scene using a mask that discriminates land from water. The interesting thing is that the percentage of water on Earth does not include only the obvious sources of water, like oceans and lakes, but less obvious sources as well. Since oceans cover so significant an expanse of Earth's surface, it is not surprising that they play a significant role in global climate stability and in global climate change. Seriously? Humans have disturbed a very small portion of the earths surface. The human population of the world (on average) used 11.61% of the land for cultivating crops. If it the US 50% less factor is assumed, then urbanization would cover approximately 0.85% of the world's land (1.1 million square kilometers). Findings published in Nature in January 2014 show that warming currents in the North Atlantic adversely affect (1) "sea-ice redistribution" (i.e., shifting positions of large bodies of sea-ice) in Antarctica, (2) melting ice in the southern icecap of Antarctica, (3) a warming climate with (4) increased ice melt in Antarctica. Deserts cover 33 percent of the land area of the earth. I would agree that the percentage of 10% is untouched by humans/uninhabited is extremely low. For instance, while warming temperatures from greenhouse gases cause greater ocean cloud cover, counteracting some of the rise in Earth temperature, the warming is also raising sea levels and making ocean waters more acidic affecting saltwater flora and sea creatures. A tiny, tiny fraction. The first is the more general about 70% of Earth is water while about 30% is land (US Geological Society). Being 3500 square miles in size, it is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. 40 billion people would also raise the CO2 emission greatly causing inccreased climate change, which is the cause of stronger hurricanes, animal and plant population decrease and poor air quality for everyone, shortening the life span of humans. km) Urban land area where elevation is below 5 meters (sq. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/signpost/cc.html. Subtracting this uninhabitable 57% (32,665,981 mi 2) from the total land area leaves 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres of habitable land. Not the tasty chocolate-chip kind, but the kind that stores data about our users. What are the 4 major biomes? Required fields are marked *. Rivers constitute the smallest volume of Earth's water--aside from biological water in Earth's occupants--with a volume of 509 cubic miles. In all regions, urban land expanded either faster or equivalent to population growth rates, suggesting our societies are also becoming more expansive. Top subjects are Science, Literature, and Social Sciences. As I said in my article, “In 2009, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center published a map in the World Bank’s World Development report, showing that 95% of the world’s population is concentrated in just 10% of the land surface. The percentages of earth's land surface can be divided into different types: 20% covered by snow land, 20% mountains, 20% dry land, 30% good land that can be farmed, 10% land doesn't have topsoil. According to the FAO Global Land Cover SHARE database, produced in 2014, 0.6% of Earth's land surface is defined as 'Artificial surfaces'. Both the satellite image and the map were compared to see the changes of percentage and total area of land cover. The covers the whole Earth and about 30 % of Earth s land could Save two Plant! 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