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Most water in Earth's atmosphere and crust comes from saline seawater, while fresh water accounts for nearly 1% of the total. The vast bulk of the water on Earth is saline or salt water, with an average salinity of 35‰ (or 3.5%, roughly equivalent to 34 grams of salts in 1 kg of seawater), though this varies slightly according to the amount of runoff received from surrounding land.
Antarctica provides the water hemisphere with the majority of Earth's ice. Most of the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and the whole Southern Ocean, are in the water hemisphere. The water hemisphere is approximately 89 percent water (almost all pertaining to the World Ocean), 6 percent dry land and 5 percent polar ice cap.
Earth is rounded into an ellipsoid with a circumference of about 40,000 km. It is the densest planet in the Solar System. Of the four rocky planets, it is the largest and most massive. Earth is about eight light-minutes away from the Sun and orbits it, taking a year (about 365.25 days) to complete one revolution.
A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may also be considered an accretion disk for the star itself, because gases or other material may be falling from the inner edge of the disk onto the surface of the star.
Water covers about 71% of Earth's surface. [1] The origin of water on Earth is the subject of a body of research in the fields of planetary science, astronomy, and astrobiology. Earth is unique among the rocky planets in the Solar System in having oceans of liquid water on its surface. [2] Liquid water, which is necessary for all known forms of ...
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers ( stratigraphy ). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
Earth 's surface is dominated by the ocean, which forms 75% of Earth's surface. An ocean world, ocean planet or water world is a type of planet that contains a substantial amount of water in the form of oceans, as part of its hydrosphere, either beneath the surface, as subsurface oceans, or on the surface, potentially submerging all dry land.
NASA just announced that they've found 219 potential planets, and of those, 10 are close to the size of Earth and could possibly sustain life. NASA finds evidence of 10 new Earth-size planets that ...