The Water Cycle

Created: Thursday, 16 June 2011 10:33 | Published: Thursday, 16 June 2011 10:33 | Written by Super User | Print | Email

How does water cycle Occur?

What is water?

The colorless and tasteless liquid, that covers about 71% of the earth. 97% of the water on earth is salt water and the other 3% is fresh water.

What is water cycle?

It is the continuous movement of water on above and below the surface of the Earth.

Water keeps going around and around and around and around.

The journey water takes as it circulates from the land to the sky and back again is also known as 'Hydrologic cycle' or 'H2O' cycle.

How does the Water Cycle work?

This cycle is made up of a few main parts:

1.    evaporation (and transpiration)
2.    condensation
3.    precipitation
4.    collection

Evaporation:

When the sun heats up water in rivers or lakes or the ocean and turns it into vapor or steam.

Condensation:

Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming clouds.

Precipitation

It occurs when so much water has condensed in the cloud and that the air cannot hold it anymore.

Collection:

When water falls back to earth as precipitation, it may fall back in the oceans, lakes or rivers or it may end up on land.

The cycle begins again. Water can change states among liquid, vapor, and ice at various places in the water cycle.

Why water is important for us?

There's a whole lot of water on Earth.97% of the water on the planet is in the oceans of the world, and as they are salty they are unusable for drinking. About 3% of the planet's water is fresh, but in this 3% around 1.6% of water is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36% is found underground in aquifers and wells. Only about 0.036% of the planet's total water supply is found in lakes and rivers! That's still thousands of trillions of gallons.

Rainfall and snowfall are of relatively clean water, without pollutants. Living organisms play an important role in the water cycle. Most organisms contain a significant amount of water.

Animals and plants lose water through evaporation from the body surfaces. In plants, water is drawn in at the roots and moves to the leaves and from where it evaporates quickly. This special case is called transpiration because it is responsible for so much of the water that enters the atmosphere!

And it is water in a constant cycle where it evaporates from the ocean, travels through the air, rains down on the land and then flows back to the ocean. The Sun's heat provides energy to evaporate water from the Earth's surface

Why oceans are salty?

The oceans are salty because while flows through rivers it picks up small amounts of mineral salts from the rocks and soil of the river beds

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