| Teraliters (TL) | Kiloliters (kL) |
|---|---|
| 1 Teraliter | 1000000000 kL |
| 2 Teraliters | 2000000000 kL |
| 3 Teraliters | 3000000000 kL |
| 4 Teraliters | 4000000000 kL |
| 5 Teraliters | 5000000000 kL |
| 10 Teraliters | 10000000000 kL |
| 20 Teraliters | 20000000000 kL |
| 25 Teraliters | 25000000000 kL |
| 50 Teraliters | 50000000000 kL |
| 100 Teraliters | 100000000000 kL |
| Reference | Teraliters (TL) | Kiloliters (kL) |
|---|---|---|
| A teaspoon | 5 × 10-15 TL | 0.000005 kL |
| A can of soft drink | 3.3 × 10-13 TL | 0.00033 kL |
| A wine bottle | 7.5 × 10-13 TL | 0.00075 kL |
| A bathtub | 1.5 × 10-10 TL | 0.15 kL |
| An Olympic swimming pool | 0.0000025 TL | 2500 kL |
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.
The kilolitre is a unit of volume equal to one thousand litres, and therefore exactly one cubic metre. Its symbol is kL. The two names describe the same quantity, and which one appears depends entirely on the trade and the country: water utilities in the southern hemisphere say kilolitre where European ones say cubic metre.
Household water is where most people meet it. Australian, New Zealand and South African water bills are issued in kilolitres, tariffs are set as a price per kilolitre with rising blocks for heavier use, and drought restrictions are expressed as an allowance of so many kilolitres per household per quarter. A typical family uses between fifty and two hundred a year, so the annual bill fits in three digits.
Because the unit equals a cubic metre, it also carries an unusually direct physical meaning. A kilolitre of water weighs one tonne and would fill a cube one metre on each side, so a household allowance of a hundred kilolitres is a hundred tonnes of water, delivered, pumped and treated. Stating it that way is one reason the unit appears in conservation campaigns as often as on invoices.
Bulk liquid logistics uses it for cargo. A flexible tank fitted inside a shipping container carries around twenty-four kilolitres of wine, juice or edible oil, road tankers are rated in kilolitres, and depot storage is planned in thousands of them. Japanese petroleum statistics are published in kilolitres rather than in barrels, which makes Japanese energy figures awkward to compare with those of countries that use the barrel.
Industry generally prefers the cubic metre for the same quantity, because it is the coherent SI form and because it multiplies cleanly with metres of head, square metres of surface and other dimensional quantities. The kilolitre survives where the substance being measured is a liquid sold to the public, which is exactly where a name containing the word litre reads more naturally.
Converting is trivial in one direction and awkward in the other. One kilolitre is one cubic metre exactly and a thousand litres exactly, but 264.2 United States gallons and 220 imperial gallons, and about 6.29 barrels of oil, none of which are round numbers.
One kilolitre equals 1000 litres, 1 cubic metre, about 264.2 US gallons, or about 220 imperial gallons.