For those of you who’ve heard of the water cycle, you may be familiar with this image.

The

water cycle is often taught as a simple circular cycle of evaporation, condensation, and

precipitation. Although this can be a useful model, the reality is much more complicated. The

paths and influences of water through Earth’s ecosystems are extremely complex and not

completely understood. Water is essential to life on Earth. In its three phases (solid, liquid, and

gas), water ties together the major parts of the Earth’s climate system — air, clouds, the ocean,

lakes, vegetation, snowpack, and glaciersoffsite link. The water cycle shows the continuous

movement of water within the Earth and atmosphere. It is a complex system that includes

many different processes.

Since over 90% of the Earth’s water is in our oceans, let’s start there. Heat from the sun

transformed some of the liquid on the surface of the oceans into gas called water vapor, we call

this process evaporation, as evaporation occurs it actually cools the atmosphere. And how do

we get vapor back to water? The same energy from the sun that created evaporation also

creates wind that moves air around the globe, as the air containing this, water vapor rises, it

cools and the vapor begins to condense into clouds, this is referred to as condensation. Just as

evaporation cooled the air, the process of condensation releases heat back into the

atmosphere, since the wind has moved the clouds to a new location, that heat has been

redistributed across the earth, this is one of the ways the earth regulates its temperature.

Now these formed clouds can produce rain, hail, snow or sleet. When the water falls form the

atmosphere in these forms, we call it precipitation. Most precipitation falls right back into the
oceans completing the cycle, most that falls on land gets evaporated fairly quickly. However

there is a lot of precipitation left over that can go in many different directions on land. So where

does precipitation go from there?

There is a process we call runoff, it is the process where water runs over the surface of earth.

For example, let’s say snow and ice falls in the winter atop a high mountain. When spring

comes, the temperature gets warmer and that seems snow and ice melts into water. More

water is added when it rain across the landscape, with the help of gravity, that water flows into

streams and rivers; those lead into lakes and reservoirs and finally go back into the ocean

where we started. But along the way it does some other things too.

For one, it helps geological features by erosion and gives a beautiful landscapes, rivers carry

sediments across the land into the oceans which brings life sustaining minerals to plants and

animals. Some of the precipitations seeps into the ground in a process called infiltration and

percolation, water can travel into the ground between cracks in the sediments refilling aquifers

or big underground reservoirs. Some of that water we pump up and use, and some stay down

there for thousands of years but still, part of the water cycle. The way water infiltrates soils

varies depending on the kind soil and the amount and intensity of the precipitation falling in the

area.

The water that stays in the surface can get used up by plants and trees, this is what we call the

“plant uptake”. It gets drawn by the root systems and sent it up to the leaves there, through
the process we call transpiration, the moisture heads out of the leaves or evaporates cooling

the plant off, it’s kind of like plants sweat and still it’s an enormous part of the water cycle. We

use water in a ton of different ways during the cycle, not just a clean and drink, but also to run

big turbines, make electricity whether by rivers or infiltration. Much of the water ends up back

in the ocean, only the water on the surface of the ocean evaporates, so a lot of water stays very

deep for a long time, but water in the ocean doesn’t just stay in the same place, there is

actually a big underwater current called the ocean conveyor belt or also known as

“thermohaline circulation”. This big underwater current goes across the entire globe bringing

cold waters to warm areas, and warm waters to cold areas, taking around a thousand to fifteen

hundred years to complete. This ends up balancing out climate temperatures to make the earth

a more temperature place for us to live.