| Cubic centimeters (cm³) | Teraliters (TL) |
|---|---|
| 1 Cubic centimeter | 1 × 10-15 TL |
| 2 Cubic centimeters | 2 × 10-15 TL |
| 3 Cubic centimeters | 3 × 10-15 TL |
| 4 Cubic centimeters | 4 × 10-15 TL |
| 5 Cubic centimeters | 5 × 10-15 TL |
| 10 Cubic centimeters | 1 × 10-14 TL |
| 20 Cubic centimeters | 2 × 10-14 TL |
| 25 Cubic centimeters | 2.5 × 10-14 TL |
| 50 Cubic centimeters | 5 × 10-14 TL |
| 100 Cubic centimeters | 1 × 10-13 TL |
| Reference | Cubic centimeters (cm³) | Teraliters (TL) |
|---|---|---|
| A teaspoon | 5 cm³ | 5 × 10-15 TL |
| A can of soft drink | 330 cm³ | 3.3 × 10-13 TL |
| A wine bottle | 750 cm³ | 7.5 × 10-13 TL |
| A bathtub | 150000 cm³ | 1.5 × 10-10 TL |
| An Olympic swimming pool | 2.5 × 109 cm³ | 0.0000025 TL |
The cubic centimetre is a unit of volume equal to one millionth of a cubic metre, written cm³ and often abbreviated cc. It is the volume of a cube one centimetre on each side, and since the litre was redefined in 1964 it is exactly one millilitre. The two names describe the same quantity, but they belong to different trades and are not interchangeable in every context.
Engines are its most visible home. Motorcycle and small-engine displacement is quoted in cubic centimetres, so a 125, a 600 and a litre bike are named by the swept volume of their cylinders. Licence categories in much of the world are drawn on the same scale, with a 125 cc limit for learners in many European countries, which turns the unit into a legal boundary rather than a mere description.
Car engines cross over to litres at about a thousand cubic centimetres, purely for readability, so a 1998 cc engine is advertised as a two-litre. American practice used cubic inches for the same purpose well into the 1980s, and the conversion is worth knowing: 1000 cubic centimetres is 61 cubic inches, so a 350 cubic inch engine is 5.7 litres.
Medicine has deliberately retreated from the abbreviation. Syringes were once marked in cc and clinicians spoke that way, but handwritten cc can be misread as a unit symbol or as a pair of zeros, and medication safety bodies now place it on lists of abbreviations that should not be used. The instruction is to write mL instead, even though the quantity is identical.
Materials science keeps the unit for density. Grams per cubic centimetre is the standard way to state how heavy a substance is for its size: water is 1.00, aluminium 2.70, steel about 7.85, lead 11.34 and gold 19.3. Those numbers are memorable precisely because the cubic centimetre is small enough that everyday solids land between one and twenty.
Modelling and manufacturing use it for part volume. Computer-aided design reports the volume of a component in cubic centimetres, which converts directly to mass once a density is chosen and to material cost in additive manufacturing. It is the natural unit for anything that fits in a hand.
One cubic centimetre equals 1 millilitre, 1000 cubic millimetres, 0.000001 cubic metres, or about 0.061 cubic inches.
The teralitre is a unit of volume equal to a thousand gigalitres, or 1,000,000,000,000 litres. Its symbol is TL. It is exactly one cubic kilometre, and that is how the quantity is almost always written, because at this scale what is being measured is no longer a container but a piece of the planet.
Lakes are the obvious application. Lake Baikal holds about 23,600 cubic kilometres of fresh water, more than any other lake on earth, and Lake Superior about 12,100. Those two figures alone amount to a fifth of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water, which is the kind of statement the unit exists to make.
Rivers are described by the volume they move rather than by what they hold. The Amazon discharges roughly 6600 cubic kilometres a year into the Atlantic, more than the next several rivers combined, and total human withdrawal of fresh water from all sources runs to about 4000 cubic kilometres a year. Setting those two numbers side by side in the same unit is one of the clearest ways to state the scale of water use.
Ice is measured here too, and the numbers are larger again. The Greenland ice sheet contains close to 2.9 million cubic kilometres, and in recent decades it has been losing a few hundred each year, a figure that converts directly into millimetres of sea level because the ocean's surface area is known. The Antarctic sheet is an order of magnitude larger still.
The ocean itself sets the ceiling. All the seawater on earth amounts to about 1.335 billion cubic kilometres, so a single teralitre is roughly one billionth of it. Below the ocean, the largest managed water bodies are engineered reservoirs, and even the biggest of those hold only a few tens of cubic kilometres.
In practice the name teralitre is rare and the cubic kilometre is standard. Hydrology, glaciology and climate science all use km³, and a figure given in teralitres is more likely to come from a water utility extending its own gigalitre scale upward than from a scientific source. The two are identical, so no conversion is needed, only recognition.
One teralitre equals 1,000,000,000,000 litres, 1,000,000,000 cubic metres, 1 cubic kilometre, or 1000 gigalitres.