Global fresh water volume. Illustration of the planet Earth with a visualisation of a sphere (over the UK) showing the amount of accessible fresh water in the world. This has a volume of 4.3917 million cubic kilometres and forms a sphere 203 kilometres across. This is just 0.31 percent of the water on Earth. All the water, including sea water and ice caps, has a total volume of over 1.4 billion cubic kilometres, and would form a much larger sphere some 1390 kilometres across. This data is from 1987. For a series of similar images, see C026/0521 to C026/0524.