• Question: What would happen if everyone in the world started to swim in the sea at exactly the same time?

    Asked by simplysugar to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Around 6.73 billion people on Earth, each human takes approximately 100 litres volume. Surface area sea is 325 x 10^6 sq kms so rise would be 0.2m/20cm….i think

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hmmmmmm well there are 7,000,000,000 people in the world and the ocean covers 70 % of the world’s surface. I’m not actually sure what would happen! But I guess that people would eventually start to bump into one another if they could keep swimming for long enough.

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      That’s a good question… I suppose the sea level would increase!

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      If you take the average human volume as 70 litres, and the world’s population as 6.8 billion, if everyone got into the sea at the same time, its volume would increase by 70 x 6.8 billion litres = 476 billion litres. However, as the volume of the sea is estimated to be around 1.6 billion cubic kilometres, the proportional increase in its volume would be very small, and its level would only rise very slightly

    • Photo: Jane Henry

      Jane Henry answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      My guess would be that the sea is so big that even 7 billion people swimming would not raise sea level that much but I might be wrong. Greenland glaciers melting on the other hand would have a significent effect.

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