How Big Is 2% Of The Ocean?

It’s easy to forget that the earth is mostly water.

Often, we are never exposed to more of the ocean than what’s visible from the local beach. It’s so easy to forget that the earth is mostly blue.

With 71% of the earth covered in water, it begs the question, can we leverage the size and scale of our oceans to help improve some of humanities woes?

In our latest podcast, Masters of Future Technology student Louis Gordon dives deep into the future of blue carbon. During the discussion, he made an interesting point. He suggested that utilising just 2% of the world's oceans for aquaculture could see up to 12 billion people feed.

It’s a cool statistic but it raises plenty of questions. Most practical of which is just how big an area is 2% of the ocean?

A quick google suggests the area of the worlds ocean’s is approximately 362 million km2. This means that 2% is roughly 7.2 million km2.

That’s big, but it doesn’t really mean much without context.

So, for context (and a bit of fun) let's look at this.

The land area of New Zealand is 268 thousand km2, so 2% of the world's oceans is roughly equivalent to 27 New Zealand's.