Once upon a time, the Grand Canyon was forged by the rushing waters of the Colorado River over millions upon millions of years. The river still snakes through the canyon, but its beauty now lies in the jaw-dropping vastness and breathtaking openness of the landscape. What if, though, we were to imagine a Grand Canyon that was restored to its former watery glory? In fact, let’s picture the canyon being filled to the brim with water. How much liquid would it take?
The Grand Canyon National Park has a total volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters (147 trillion cubic feet), according to the National Park Service. It’s not exactly clear what this statistic refers to and it might include some of the greater area beyond the gorge itself, but it’s the closest you’ll find to a solid, official statistic on the great canyon’s volume.
Since 1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters, this means the Grand Canyon could hold around 4.17 quadrillion liters of water.
That’s a lot of water, but there’s plenty to go around. According to the US Geological Survey, the planet has a total of 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (332,519,000 cubic miles) of water (note: that’s cubic kilometers, not cubic meters). Of this vast reservoir of water, the NOAA estimates 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometers (321,003,271 cubic miles) in the ocean.
Truth be told, this article was inspired by a viral video by Zack D. Films explaining how long it would take to fill the Grand Canyon with pee, because why not? Obviously, public urination is frowned upon and illegal, plus the National Parks should be treated with nothing but respect. However, it’s a fun thought experiment (yeah, please don’t actually pee in the Grand Canyon).
The average person excretes around 1.89 liters (0.5 gallons) of liquid waste a day. Therefore, the Grand Canyon would only get around 15.1 billion liters (4 billion gallons) of urine if all 8 billion humans peed into it for one day. At this rate, it would take nearly 800,000 years of continuous whizzing to fill the canyon, according to their workings.
Of course, you could fill it with any liquid. Theoretically, you could also pump the Grand Canyon with 4.17 quadrillion liters of beer, wine, whale milk, orange juice, grape soda, or forbidden sarcophagus juice. However, we’ll leave the challenge of sourcing those liquids to your imagination.
