2009–10 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season

The average depth of the ocean is 2.4 miles, with the Pacific on average about a thousand feet deeper than the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Altogether 60 percent of the planetБЂ™s surface is ocean more than a mile deep. As Philip Ball notes, we would better call our planet not Earth but Water. Of the 3 percent of EarthБЂ™s water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount-0.036 percent-is found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller part-just 0.001 percent-exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planetБЂ™s ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on nearly two miles of ice, at the North Pole just fifteen feet of it. Antarctica alone has six million cubic miles of ice-enough to raise the oceans by a height of two hundred feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only an inch. Sea level, incidentally, is an almost entirely notional concept ...»