Enjoy water? You’re drinking dinosaur pee

Toronto Sun ^ | May 29, 2015 | Postmedia Network

[SunkenCiv]

Figures that the author's name is Fishman.

[ElkGroveDan]

Forget the dinosaurs, a friend who works in waste treatment once pointed out that by the time the water in the Mississippi reaches New Orleans it has passed through half the people in the Midwest.

[bert]

conservation of water

water can neither be created nor destroyed?

If that is so, how can there be acid rain?

[lonevoice]

What a fun factoid to have at your command when you want to freak out an envirowhacko.

[Bernard Marx]

But it’s all purified through the distillation inherent in the Water Cycle.

This and other nutty "science" stories I'm running across these days, make me wonder if schools even teach fundamental science like the Water Cycle these days -- assuming the teachers were taught it themselves.

[omega4412]

<nerd>

Back of the envelope calculation using the numbers from the Wikipedia articles on water cycle and biomass (ecology)

The turnover time is the time to run all the water in the physical water cycle through the biological water cycle.

Notation as in Fortran: 1E6 = 10⁶ = 1 million

Total volume of water on earth = 1386E6 km³ = 1.4E24 grams

Annual biomass production = 1E11 tonnes carbon/year = 1.5E17 grams water/year

assuming biomass is CH₂O, that is, biomass is cellulose but ignoring the one water molecule released per glucose when glucose is polymerized to cellulose. This factor isn't important given how rough the estimate of annual biomass production is likely to be.

So the turnover time for water is (1.4E24 grams water)/(1.2E17 grams water/year) = 1E7 years = 10 million years

So 6 or 7 turnovers since the last dinosaur peed in the drinking water (K-T extinction 66 million years ago)

</nerd>

[Bigg Red]

Charles Fishman is sadly misinformed.

[colorado tanker]

LOL!

[Gene Eric]

>> Enjoy water? You’re drinking dinosaur pee

Good to know we’re not excluding the value of preschool theories from FR.