Home arrow Water and Waste arrow Water arrow Water Cycle



The Water Cycle


The earth has a fixed amount of water.  This water keeps going around and around and around in what we call the "Water Cycle". 

The water in a glass you drink may have fallen from the sky as rain only last week, but the water itself has been around for about as long as the earth has!  

 Image  When the first fish crawled out of the ocean onto land, your glass of water was apart of that ocean.
 When Tyrannosaurus Rex chased its prey across rivers, your glass of water was apart of those rivers.     
 Image

            The Water Cycle
Image

The Water Cycle is made up of 5 parts:
  • Evaporation
  • Transpiration
  • Condensation
  • Precipitation
  • Run Off

Evaporation:


Evaporation is when the sun heats up water in oceans, lakes and rivers and turns it into vapour or steam. The water vapour or steam leaves the oceans, lakes and rivers and goes into the air.
An example of these is steam rising from a boiling kettle

 Transpiration:


When plants lose water out of their leaves it is called transpiration.  Transpiration gives evaporation a bit of a hand in getting the water vapour back up into the sky.

  Image

Condensation:   

 
Condensation is when water vapour in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid to create clouds. 
Image

An example of this is when water forms on the outside of a cold glass of water on a hot day. The water on the outside of the glass doesn’t leak through the glass but comes from the air! Water vapour in the warm air turns back into liquid water when it touches the cold glass.

Precipitation: 


 Image Precipitation happens when too much water condenses and the air in cannot hold it anymore.  The clouds get so heavy that water falls back to the ground as rain, hail, sleet or snow.

Run Off:


Water that falls from the sky can soak into the ground and become trapped between rock and clay layers: this is called groundwater.
Most of the water flows down hill above or under the ground and collect in the ground aquifers, oceans, lakes and rivers where the cycle starts again. This is called Run Off.

Groundwater:


In The Moree Plains some communities source their water from a large underground water supply called the Artesian Basin.

Image

Water and Waste Home Page