| Teraliters (TL) | US Dry pints (pt) |
|---|---|
| 1 Teraliter | 1816165969717 pt |
| 2 Teraliters | 3632331939434 pt |
| 3 Teraliters | 5448497909151 pt |
| 4 Teraliters | 7264663878868 pt |
| 5 Teraliters | 9080829848585 pt |
| 10 Teraliters | 18161659697169 pt |
| 20 Teraliters | 36323319394338 pt |
| 25 Teraliters | 45404149242923 pt |
| 50 Teraliters | 90808298485846 pt |
| 100 Teraliters | 181616596971691 pt |
| Reference | Teraliters (TL) | US Dry pints (pt) |
|---|---|---|
| A teaspoon | 5 × 10-15 TL | 0.00908083 pt |
| A can of soft drink | 3.3 × 10-13 TL | 0.599335 pt |
| A wine bottle | 7.5 × 10-13 TL | 1.36212 pt |
| A bathtub | 1.5 × 10-10 TL | 272.425 pt |
| An Olympic swimming pool | 0.0000025 TL | 4540415 pt |
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 United States dry pint is a unit of volume equal to 550.610471 millilitres, or 33.6 cubic inches. Its symbol is pt. It belongs to a separate American measuring system used for produce and grain rather than for liquids, and it is about sixteen per cent larger than the United States liquid pint of 473 millilitres.
Two parallel chains exist because two kinds of goods were once measured differently. Liquids descend from the wine gallon of 231 cubic inches, while dry goods descend from the Winchester bushel of 2150.42 cubic inches, a corn measure standardised in medieval England. Dividing the bushel by four gives a peck, by thirty-two a dry quart, and by sixty-four a dry pint, and none of those figures has any relation to the liquid chain.
Berries are where the unit is still met. Blueberries, raspberries and strawberries are sold in American markets in pint and quart baskets, and the basket is a dry measure. A pint of blueberries is therefore 551 millilitres of fruit, not 473, and a shopper comparing that basket with a pint of cream is comparing two different quantities under one name.
Nothing on a label resolves the ambiguity. Both are written pt, both are called a pint, and the word gives no clue as to which chain is meant. In practice the contents decide: if it pours, it is liquid measure, and if it is heaped, it is dry. That rule is reliable but it is nowhere written down, which is why converted American recipes so often disagree with one another.
Its existence is a survival from selling by bulk. Before cheap accurate scales, grain, apples, potatoes and shellfish were sold by filling a stamped measure and levelling it off, and the whole dry chain from bushel down to pint served that trade. Almost all of it has now been replaced by weight, and United States produce regulations increasingly specify pounds instead.
For conversion, the safest approach is to abandon the name entirely. A dry pint is 551 millilitres, a dry quart 1101, a peck 8.81 litres and a bushel 35.24. Writing the metric figure removes an ambiguity that the English word carries and cannot shed.
One United States dry pint equals 550.61 millilitres, 33.6 cubic inches, half a US dry quart, or about 1.164 US liquid pints.