Water Works on the Blue Planet
Journal article by Diane Fisher; The Technology Teacher, Vol. 61, 2001
Journal Article Excerpt
Water Works on the Blue Planet. by Diane Fisher Water, water, every where, |
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
| From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part II By Samuel Taylor Coleridge In Coleridge's poem, the Ancient Mariner is adrift on a windless sea, surrounded by water too salty to drink. (Sorry, we couldn't find a picture of a ship with windless sails!) When we consider that almost three-fourths of Earth's surface is water, it's hard to imagine there could ever be a shortage. But of all that water, 97.5% of it is too salty to drink. That's how much of the water is in the oceans. As for the rest, we land creatures need to take very good care of it. Haves and Have-nots That's the interesting thing about water. Its presence or absence means life or no life. Some places, like the Brazilian rain forest, have a lot of water, while other places, like the Sahara Desert, have none. Some years a place is flooded with rain and snow. Other years that same place is dry as a bleached bone. But one thing about water doesn't change. There is only a certain amount of water on Earth--no more, no less--and that total doesn't change. What changes is how it is distributed. The process by which water moves around the planet is called the Water Cycle or--to be technically fancy--the Hydrologic Cycle. Living on a Fixed Budget How the water is divided up among the oceans, the land, and the atmosphere is called the Water Budget. Budgets are usually about money. If you have a paying job or receive an allowance, you know how much money you will receive each week or month. You must plan how you will divide this money up to buy the things you need. This process is called budgeting your money. Earth's water budget, however, is really more like a Monopoly[TM] game than one person's budget. In real life, you might be able to work more to make more money. Or you might choose to stash your money under your mattress, taking it out of circulation altogether. Monopoly is a board game which pretends to be like real life. In Monopoly, players earn money each time they go around the board. They have chances to buy land, houses, and hotels, and to collect money from other players who land on their property. Players can even get into trouble, losing some of their money or landing in jail. Unlike in real life, however, in Monopoly the total amount of money available for all the players remains the same. You can't just go printing more Monopoly money when you run short! The game is all about how that fixed amount of money gets spread around. Does one player get rich, leaving the other players poor? Or does the money get distributed more evenly? When each player rolls the dice, makes a move, and then spends money, wealth gets redistributed in some way. In the Water Cycle "game," wealth (that is, water) gets redistributed by several means. But the difference between this game and Monopoly is that no matter what happens during any particular turn in the Water Cycle game, the "players" all end up with very close to the same amount of wealth they had at the beginning. Who are these players? The players are the oceans, the land, and the air. In the Water Cycle game, fair or not, the oceans have and keep almost all the wealth. The total of all the fresh (that is, not salty) water on land, including lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, puddles, bathtubs, kitchen sinks, and all the water under the ground, comes to only 2.4% of Earth's water. The atmosphere contains the rest, only .001% (that's 1/100,000th), in the form of water vapor and clouds.This tiny percentage of the water that is in the atmosphere at any given time is what keeps the whole system moving. The atmosphere is the transportation system that enables the water to, well ... cycle. Just to give you an idea how hard the atmosphere works to move water around, imagine the entire sky, horizon to horizon, top to bottom, over the whole world being filled with dark, gray clouds. This is how much water the atmosphere ... |
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