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NASA Says Moon Has More Water Than Great Lakes
jerryjamesstone writes "The US Great Lakes have some competition: the moon. Yes, that old thing in the sky may hold more than all of the water contained in the Great Lakes, according to a NASA-funded study. From the article: 'Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, along with other scientists across the nation, determined that the water was likely present very early in the moon's formation history as hot magma started to cool and crystallize. This finding means water is native to the moon.'"
"The largest lake entirely within Canada is the Great Bear Lake. None of the Great Lakes are entirely in Canada, so none of them count. The deepest lake in Canada is Lake Manitou, which has an island inside it, and in that island there is a lake. That makes it the largest lake that's in an island that's in a lake in the world."
Though, I would expect people living next door to the US to be used to its "US is the world" attitude by now.
The surface area of an ellipsoid (in this case, the moon) expands as it's diameter increases. Therefore, your math is off by more than a little bit.
According to Wikipedia, the moon has a mean radius of 1,737.10km and has a volume of 2.1958E10 km^3.
From your calculations, the great lakes have a volume of 22,560 km^3. Therefore, the volume of the great lakes times the number of books in the library of congress is 6.5424E11 km^3.
If we add this volume to the volume of the moon, the volume of our new moon is 6.76198E11 km^3. Assuming the new moon takes on a spherical shape, we can get the new radius of the moon by using the formula for the volume of a sphere, V=4/3r^3. Therefore, we deduce that the new radius is 7,974.65km.
Further assuming that the moon as it exists now settles in the center of this new waterworld relatively undisturbed, with it's mean radius remaining at 1,737.10km, we can calculate the mean depth of the water on the moon as 6237.55km.