Water Is a Renewable Resource

A raindrop is held together by surface tension and when falls from the sky and lands on to the ground or into the ocean, it ceases to become a raindrop anymore, and it will try to seek its own level as it eventually joins other droplets.  It might be consumed or end up in a in stream, river, lake, or an ocean, and it can also go underground.  When a raindrop lands, the liquid in the drop will be attracted to the surface of what it has landed on, it will continue to spread and eventually adhere to this surface or be repelled away.  The water cycle is often taught as being a simple circular cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, but it is more complex than that.  The water cycle can be thought of as death, when the water evaporates and rebirth when we get precipitation.  There are actually seven steps involved in the water cycle and the ones that you don’t usually hear about are Interception, Infiltration, Percolation and Transpiration.  Interception is when precipitation does not reach the soil, but is instead intercepted by the leaves, branches of plants and the forest floor.  Infiltration happens when water soaks into the soil from the ground level until it can’t hold any more.  Water that infiltrates the ground will be a rebirth for wells.  Percolation occurs when water moves downward through the soil under gravitational forces and is filtered through the soil into aquifers.  This will replenish aquifers that hold groundwater, so this is also like a rebirth.  Plants suck up most of the water that they need from their roots, but when the weather gets very hot, water will be pulled into the leaves.  This will cool down the plants, but water will be lost during this process.

Since global warming, and climate patterns are continually changing, causing the depletion of the ozone layer, it is possible that all of Earth’s water might disappear one day, like what we think happened on Mars.  There are science fiction movies about terraforming the Red Planet, but it is not realistic in the near future for Mars to undergo a rebirth.  It would be really nice for us to have a second Earth, a place where humans could live without having to put on a space suit.  I think that we should be trying harder to protect our own planet, instead of looking for another place to live.

Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge 236 where today’s theme is “Rebirth”.