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So this picture should be fairly familiar to you. It's been in a
couple of your readings and I believe it was on your test about
water. It shows you the complete water cycle. Remember the
sun drives the water cycle by powering its 2 major components
which are going to be evaporation and condensation.
Evaporation changes liquid water into gaseous water vapor
and then moves it up into the atmosphere.
Condensation (which on this map is called vapour transport)
occurs as the evaporated water cools and then it becomes clouds.
Once there's enough moisture in those clouds, precipitation
occurs. What happens is these clouds become so full of
moisture that drops of water are going to condensate within
the clouds and then fall out as either rain, sleet, hail, or snow.
Some of this rain, sleet, hail, or snow is going to fall on tree
canopies and then evaporate again through transpiration.
Other parts of that precipitation are going to wash over the
Earth in streams, lakes, and rivers as runoff. Sometimes
this water can accumulate into the frozen glaciers that you
see at the top of those mountains. The runoff can also form snow caps or ice sheets.
Sometimes this runoff infiltrates the ground to become
groundwater. On this map this process is called "percolation."
We get a substantial amount of our water from underground
in permeable rock stored as aquifers and water can actually
flow through these aquifers (which on this map is called
'groundwater flow'). We use the water in aquifers as one of
our primary sources of freshwater. One of the problems
we're having with aquifers is that even though water is a
renewable resource, aquifers are nonrenewable because
we are using up the water much faster than we are replacing it.
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