Cubic Kilometers to Liters (km³ to L)

1 cubic kilometer equals 1,000,000,000,000 liters exactly.

1 cubic kilometer = 1,000,000,000,000 liters

How to convert cubic kilometers to liters

To convert cubic kilometers to liters, multiply the number of cubic kilometers by 1,000,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply liters by 1×10⁻¹².

liters = cubic kilometers × 1,000,000,000,000

Example: 10 cubic kilometers = 10,000,000,000,000 liters.

Pints, quarts, gallons and fluid ounces differ between the US and the UK. Units are labeled 'US' or 'imperial' to avoid confusion.

About these units

Cubic Kilometer (km³)

ScientificCurrent unit

One billion cubic meters (a trillion liters). Used for very large volumes.

Picture a cube one kilometer on every edge: that is a cubic kilometer, equal to 1,000,000,000 cubic meters, or a trillion liters. The same volume is also called a teralitre, a name that follows the liter prefix system. Wikipedia converts it to about 810,713 acre-feet, or 0.2399 cubic mile.

Its scale places it among the largest everyday SI volumes. A cubic hectometer, the cube with 100 meter edges, equals one gigalitre, and a thousand of those make one cubic kilometer, which leaves the unit well above anything handled in tanks or reservoirs of ordinary size. The figure used here is 1,000,000,000,000 liters. Because one cubic mile is about 4.168 cubic kilometers, a figure in km3 is always smaller than the same volume in mi3, by that ratio.

1 cubic kilometer = 1,000,000,000,000 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Cubic metre; Wikipedia: Cubic kilometre

Liter (L)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One cubic decimeter (1,000 cm³). The everyday metric unit of volume for drinks, fuel and cooking.

The liter was born in revolutionary France. In 1795 it was introduced as a republican unit and defined as one cubic decimeter, while the gram was tied to a cubic centimeter of water. The name comes from the older French litron, itself descended from a Byzantine Greek unit of weight, not volume. A small revision of the decimeter in 1798 left the first liter about 1.000974 of today's cubic decimeter, and in 1879 the international metric authorities adopted the liter with the symbol l.

The liter then took a strange detour. In 1901 it was redefined as the space taken up by one kilogram of pure water at its densest, which made it about 1.000028 cubic decimeters, and that muddled definition lasted until 1964, when it was restored to exactly one cubic decimeter. A capital L was added as an alternative symbol in 1979 because a lowercase l is easy to mistake for the digit 1, and NIST says L is the symbol to use in the United States. A liter of water is close to a kilogram, which is why a one-liter bottle feels like a kilo in the hand.

The liter is the reference unit for volume on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; NIST Guide to the SI, Chapter 5: units outside the SI

Related conversions

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