By “smoothing out” I mean flattening all mountains and filling all trenches so that the entire earth has exactly the same radius everwhere. Water naturally spreads out equally on such a surface, so how high would the water level be?
By “smoothing out” I mean flattening all mountains and filling all trenches so that the entire earth has exactly the same radius everwhere. Water naturally spreads out equally on such a surface, so how high would the water level be?
Around 2.7 kilometres.
*Order of magnitude out.
You might be a few decimal places off.
No, there are about 1.4 billion cubic kilometres of water on earth (
V_w ≈ 1.4·10⁹ km³). Earth’s diameter isD_E ≈ 12750 km. The volume of the relatively thin shell of water is approximatelyV_w ≈ π(D_E)² t. Inserting yieldst ≈ V_w/(π(D_E)²) = 1.4·10⁹ km³/(π (12750 km)²) ≈ 2.74 km.In the original post, this was 2.7m, but has been fixed since then.