| A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but a spoonful of water contains an almost unfathomable number of atoms. There are more atoms in just a teaspoon of water than there are spoonfuls of water in the entire ocean — almost twice as many, in fact, according to math involving numbers so high most of us have never heard of them. All in all, there are about 501,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a teaspoon of water compared to just 270,850,560,000,000,000,000,000 teaspoons of water in all of the oceans combined. Though there's really only one global ocean, which covers 70% of the planet and contains 97% of the Earth's water (pick up some slack, lakes and rivers!), it's geographically divided into five oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern, also known as the Antarctic. Atoms, meanwhile, are in everything — they're the fundamental building blocks of all matter, from air and water to people and planets and everything in between. |