Category Earth Science

We use large quantities of water. We drink it, wash with it, use it in industry, and also prepare food with it. Below are the percentage of the water that each person uses every day for these activities.

Drinking:

Only a 0.2% of the water a person uses every day is for drinking. Your drinking water comes from natural sources that are either groundwater or surface water.

Groundwater comes from rain and snow that seeps into the ground. The water gets stored in open spaces and pores or in layers of sand and gravel known as aquifers. We use water wells or springs to harvest this groundwater.

Surface Water also comes from rain and snow. It is the water that fills the rivers, lakes, and streams.

Personal:

Nearly 4.2% of the water a person uses for washing, cleaning your teeth, and flushing the toilet use up this share. Water generally gets to our homes in one of two ways. Either it is delivered by a city/county water department (or maybe from a private company), or people supply their own water, normally from a well. Water delivered to homes is called “public-supplied deliveries” and water that people supply themselves is called “self supplied”, and is almost always from groundwater.

Manufactured goods:

Nearly 30.6% of water a person use for manufactured goods. The industries that produce metals, wood and paper products, chemicals, gasoline and oils, and those invaluable grabber utensils you use to get your ring out of the garbage disposal are major users of water. Probably every manufactured product uses water during some part of the production process. Industrial water use includes water used for such purposes as fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product; incorporating water into a product; or for sanitation needs within the manufacturing facility. Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals.

Food production:

This takes up most of the water we use. Water is an essential part of our diet. Without it, our bodies would not work! For vegetative growth and development plants require water in adequate quantity and at the right time. Crops have very specific water requirements, and these vary depending on local climate conditions. The production of meat requires between six and twenty time more water than for cereals. 

 

Picture Credit : Google
 

Earth’s water is always moving from one place to another. This process, called the water cycle, is a continuous journey, in which water moves between the land, the atmosphere, and the ocean.

The water cycle shows the continuous movement of water within the Earth and atmosphere. It is a complex system that includes many different processes. Liquid water evaporates into water vapor, condenses to form clouds, and precipitates back to earth in the form of rain and snow. Water in different phases moves through the atmosphere (transportation). Liquid water flows across land (runoff), into the ground (infiltration and percolation), and through the ground (groundwater). Groundwater moves into plants (plant uptake) and evaporates from plants into the atmosphere (transpiration). Solid ice and snow can turn directly into gas (sublimation). The opposite can also take place when water vapor becomes solid (deposition). 

 

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Most of the water on Earth is in the ocean – in fact, nearly 97%. The remaining 3% is freshwater and is stored in ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers, groundwater, and surface water such as lakes and rivers. The majority of this freshwater is frozen and stored in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Glaciers around the world are changing rapidly. In general, freezing and melting are a natural part of the water cycle, but for glaciers, more ice is melting each summer than falls as snow during the winter, and they are shrinking in size as a result. Glaciers also provide water resources, like drinking water, for downstream communities, but as the size of these glaciers changes, so too does this important resource.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Water is essential to life on Earth. Without it, plants and animals would not be able to survive. Around 71 per cent of Earth is covered in water in water. This includes both salt water and fresh water. Not all of Earth’s water is easily available for us to use.

The water is concentrated at the Earth’s surface, so its relative mass compared to the whole Earth is small. It amounts to about 0.02 % of Earth’s mass!

The largest drop here represents the volume of all water, the mid sized drop freshwater, and the smallest drop (near Atlanta) all of Earth’s lake water.

 

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Over thousands of years, many different natural features, or landforms, have developed in deserts. A desert landform is a place that gets little to no rain. The climate can be either hot or cold and sometimes both. Each desert landform has one thing in common; it has less than 10 inches of rain per year. Usually deserts have a lot of wind because they are flat and have no vegetation to block out the wind.These include hills; mountains; narrow, steep-sided valleys called canyons; large, flat areas called plains; sand dunes; strange rock formations; and oases.

1. Sand dunes: These hills are formed by the wind blowing across the desert sand, so that it piles up. The most common in deserts include barchans and seif dunes. Barchan dunes are formed due to the wind action resulting in crescent-shaped dunes. These small crescent-shaped sand bodies form in locations where the wind blows consistently from one direction. Seif dunes, on the other hand, are long and narrow with a sharp crest common in the Sahara. They can also form a long chain of dunes.

2. Oases: Rare underground water can create pools of water. Plants then spring up around them. Oases typically occurs in the middle of a desert. They are fertile areas of the desert consisting of one or multiple springs surrounded by vegetation. Oasis is formed due to a mix of extreme temperatures resulting in islands of life. This comes about because the oases is situated in parts of the desert where the elevation is so low that the water table is just near the surface enabling vegetation to flourish.

3. Mesas and buttes: A mesa is a hill with steep sides and a flat top. A smaller mesa is sometimes called a butte. These landforms can also be called table mountains or table hills, because the word mesa actually means table in Spanish.

Scientists believe that mesas and buttes were formed when streams or rivers weathered and eroded away the smaller, softer rocks, leaving only the strong rock of the mesa or butte behind.

 

Picture Credit : Google

These are extremely dry and cold. Temperatures rarely rise above 10° C (50° F), even in summer. Some are covered in ice and snow all year, while others are covered in gravel and large rocks. Most of Antarctica is polar desert.

Ross Island is located in Ross Sea, Antarctica and in McMurdo Sound. Due to the persistent presence of ice sheet, the isle is sometimes taken to be part of mainland Antarctica. The island is 43 miles (69 km) long and 45 miles wide. On it are Mount Erebus (an active volcano 12,450 feet [3,800 metres] high) and Mount Terror (10,750 feet) among a series of mountain ranges intersected by deep valleys. Mount Erebus was the site in 1979 of a crash that claimed 257 lives on a sightseeing and photographic flight over Antarctica. The ranges are free of snow except for hanging glaciers on the highest slopes. McMurdo, a U.S. base, is located on the island just north of Cape Armitage, its southernmost extremity. About one mile south is Scott Base, a New Zealand station. A steep pyramid of rock called Observation Hill rises between the two stations. In 1907 Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer, established a camp at Camp Royds, and Robert Falcon Scott, in 1910, set up a camp at Cape Evans on his return expedition. These are now maintained as historic monuments.

 

Picture Credit : Google