Mark McCaughreanErr, no 😬
Something got badly lost in translation here.
An Olympic swimming pool is ~2.5 million litres.
Two per hour, 24 hrs per day = 120 million litres.
But 120 *cubic kilometres* = 120 million million litres.
Just a million times more 🙄
FWIW, this article says that the Campo Dalías desalination plant is capable of processing 97,200 cubic metres of seawater per day.
Call that 100,000 and that’s equivalent to about 100 million litres. Which is close enough to 120 million for government work.
120 cubic kilometres though? Does no-one actually think about these things before they press “publish”? 😬
https://lifasa.com/en/producto/campo-dalias-desalination-plant/
Ken Milmore@markmccaughrean The journalists are never good with billions, millions trillions etc. I would prefer to see 10^12 written rather than million million, or 10^9 rather billion. If you write it that way, it is usually easier to spot a mistake. But it may not be considered accessible enough.
@kbm0 Fully agreed – as an astronomer, it rarely makes sense to use anything other than powers of ten … unless we rescale and talk about cubic parsecs of water 🤪