Water
When you see a picture of the earth,
you see that a majority of it is blue.
Three-quarters of the surface of the earth, in fact, is covered in
water. That’s 118,500,000 square miles covered
with the stuff.
If there is so much of it on earth,
why has the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency been freaking out for decades
about water? The government developed
the Clean Water Act, and allowed states to establish and enforce regulations
enforcing the quality of water.
Neighboring states argue about water rights, and who has the right to
what amounts at what times. Why all the
fuss?
Well (ha!), of the estimated 327
million cubic miles of water, 97.22% of it is in the oceans—which means it is
salt water, and not usable as is for growth; and 2.15% is fresh but frozen in
glaciers and icebergs. That leaves only
0.03% left to circulate through what we call the “hydrologic cycle” and on
which every growing thing depends. This fresh
water cycles through snow and rain, rivers, lakes, ponds, underground, in the soil,
and evaporated as water vapor in the air.
Although we have 981,000 cubic miles
of water in the whole hydrologic cycle at any one time on the entire earth, the
water in the air as vapor or awaiting precipitation (say, 25% of the hydrologic
cycle) isn’t immediately available for living things to utilize. That leaves us water in rivers, lakes and
ponds (surface water), and water in the soil and under the ground (groundwater).
So, with the surface and groundwater,
we have 735,750 cubic miles of fresh water for every single living thing here
on the whole earth to utilize. How much
of this water that is available to us can we see? For every lake or mile of river on the
surface of the earth, there is a volume of water 25 times that
underground. This groundwater is stored
in aquifers, or reservoirs of rocks containing pores and holes that the water
flows through.
Okay, so I’ve thrown a whole mess of
numbers at you. What’s the bottom
line? Of all the blue that you see on a
photo of planet earth, a small drop of that is available for us to share with
the plants and the birds and the bears and the bees. That means we have to take care of what we
have. If chemicals or contaminants leak
into one part of the hydrologic cycle, it can infiltrate the whole thing. And although the earth does tend to heal
itself, there is only so much it can do.
Certain chemical compounds don’t disappear. We have to be responsible caretakers of this
planet.
So be kind—not only to each other, but
to Mother Nature as well. If you take
care of her, she will keep on taking care of you.
Julie S. Paschold
March 30, 2020
Reference: Soils in
Our Environment: Seventh Edition by Raymond W. Miller & Roy L. Donahue.
1995. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ.