10.2: Models of the hydrologic cycle
Key Points
- Water cycling affects the climate, transports minerals, purifies water, and replenishes the land with fresh water.
- Water with a longer residence time, such as water in oceans and glaciers, is not available for short-term cycling, which occurs via evaporation.
- Surface water evaporates (water to water vapor) or sublimates (ice to water vapor), which deposits large amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere.
- Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into clouds and is eventually followed by precipitation, which returns water to the earth’s surface.
- Rain percolates into the ground, where it may evaporate or enter bodies of water.
- Surface runoff enters oceans directly or via streams and lakes.
The Water (Hydrologic) Cycle
Water is essential for all living processes. The human body is more than one-half water and human cells are more than 70 percent water. Thus, most land animals need a supply of fresh water to survive. However, when examining the stores of water on earth, 97.5 percent of it is non-potable salt water (Figure \(\PageIndex{1-2}\)). Of the remaining water, 99 percent is locked underground as water or as ice but this water is inconveniently located, mostly in Antarctica and Greenland. Shallow groundwater is the largest reservoir of usable fresh water. Less than one percent of fresh water is present in lakes and rivers, the most heavily used water resources. If all of world's water was shrunk to the size of 1 gallon, then the total amount of fresh water would be about 1/3 cup, and the amount of readily usable fresh water would be 2 tablespoons.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Earth's Water Reservoirs Bar chart Distribution of Earth’s water including total global water, fresh water, and surface water and other fresh water and Pie chart Water usable by humans and sources of usable water. Only 2.5 percent of water on Earth is fresh water, and less than 1 percent of fresh water is easily accessible to living things. Source: United States Geographical Survey Igor Skiklomanov's chapter "World fresh water resources" in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources
Many living things, such as plants, animals, and fungi, are dependent on the small amount of fresh surface water supply, a lack of which can have massive effects on ecosystem dynamics. Humans, of course, have developed technologies to increase water availability, such as digging wells to harvest groundwater, storing rainwater, and using desalination to obtain drinkable water from the ocean. Although this pursuit of drinkable water has been ongoing throughout human history, the supply of fresh water is still a major issue in modern times.
Water is the only common substance that occurs naturally on Earth in three forms: solid, liquid and gas. The hydrosphere is the area of Earth where water movement and water storage occurs. Water reservoirs are the locations where water is stored. (Note that this term can also refer to artificial lakes created by dams.) Water is found as a liquid on the surface (rivers, lakes, oceans) and beneath the surface (groundwater), as ice (polar ice caps and glaciers), and as water vapor in the atmosphere. Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\) illustrates the average time that an individual water molecule may spend in the Earth’s major water reservoirs. Residence time is a measure of the average time an individual water molecule stays in a particular reservoir.
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Average residence time that water remains in each reservoir. Water remains in organisms for about one week, in the atmosphere for 1.5 weeks, in rivers for two weeks, as soil moisture from two weeks to a year, in swamps for 1-10 years, in lakes for 10 years, in oceans and seas for 4,000 years, as groundwater for 2 weeks to 10,000 years, and in glaciers or as permafrost for 1,000-10,000 years. Image from OpenStax ( CC-BY ).
The Water Cycle
Water cycling is extremely important to ecosystem dynamics as it has a major influence on climate and, thus, on the environments of ecosystems. For example, when water evaporates, it takes up energy from its surroundings, cooling the environment. When it condenses, it releases energy, warming the environment. The evaporation phase of the cycle purifies water, which then replenishes the land with fresh water. The flow of liquid water and ice transports minerals across the globe. It is also involved in reshaping the geological features of the earth through processes including erosion and sedimentation. The various processes that occur during the cycling of water are illustrated in Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\). The processes include the following:
- evaporation and sublimation
- transpiration
- condensation and precipitation
- subsurface water flow
- surface runoff and snowmelt
- streamflow
The water cycle is driven by the Sun’s energy as it warms the oceans and other surface waters. This leads to evaporation (water to water vapor) of liquid surface water and sublimation (ice to water vapor) of frozen water, thus moving large amounts of water into the atmosphere as water vapor. As the water vapor rises in the atmosphere, it cools and condenses. Condensation is the process in which water vapor changes to tiny droplets of liquid water. Over time, this water vapor condenses into clouds as liquid or frozen droplets and eventually leads to precipitation (rain or snow), which returns water to Earth’s surface. Most precipitation falls into the ocean. Some frozen precipitation becomes part of ice caps and glaciers. These masses of ice can store frozen water for hundreds of years or longer. Rain reaching Earth’s surface may evaporate again, flow over the surface, or percolate into the ground. Most easily observed is surface runoff: the flow of fresh water either from rain or melting ice. Runoff can make its way through streams and lakes to the oceans or flow directly to the oceans themselves.
In most natural terrestrial environments rain encounters vegetation before it reaches the soil surface. A significant percentage of water evaporates immediately from the surfaces of plants. What is left reaches the soil and begins to move down. Surface runoff will occur only if the soil becomes saturated with water in a heavy rainfall. Infiltration is the process through which water sinks into the ground and is determined by the soil or rock type through which water moves. Most water in the soil will be taken up by plant roots. The plant will use some of this water for its own metabolism, and some of that will find its way into animals that eat the plants, but much of it will be lost back to the atmosphere through a process known as evapotranspiration . Water enters the vascular system of the plant through the roots and evaporates, or transpires, through the stomata of the leaves. Water in the soil that is not taken up by a plant and that does not evaporate is able to percolate into the subsoil and bedrock. Here it forms groundwater.
Groundwater is a significant reservoir of fresh water. It exists in the pores between particles in sand and gravel, or in the fissures in rocks. Shallow groundwater flows slowly through these pores and fissures and eventually finds its way to a stream or lake where it becomes a part of the surface water again. Streams do not flow because they are replenished from rainwater directly; they flow because there is a constant inflow from groundwater below. Some groundwater is found very deep in the bedrock and can persist there for millennia. Most groundwater reservoirs, or aquifers , are the source of drinking or irrigation water drawn up through wells. In many cases these aquifers are being depleted faster than they are being replenished by water percolating down from above.
Rain and surface runoff are major ways in which minerals, including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, are cycled from land to water. More precipitation falls near the equator, and landmasses there are characterized by a tropical rainforest climate (Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\)). Less precipitation tends to fall near 20–30° north and south latitude, where the world’s largest deserts are located. These rainfall and climate patterns are related to global wind circulation cells. The intense sunlight at the equator heats air, causing it to rise and cool, which decreases the ability of the air mass to hold water vapor and results in frequent rainstorms. Around 30° north and south latitude, descending air conditions produce warmer air, which increases its ability to hold water vapor and results in dry conditions. Both the dry air conditions and the warm temperatures of these latitude belts favor evaporation. Global precipitation and climate patterns are also affected by the size of continents, major ocean currents, and mountains.
Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): World Rainfall Map The false-color map above shows the amount of rain that falls around the world. Areas of high rainfall include Central and South America, western Africa, and Southeast Asia. Since these areas receive so much rainfall, they are where most of the world's rainforests grow. Areas with very little rainfall usually turn into deserts. The desert areas include North Africa, the Middle East, western North America, and Central Asia. Source: United States Geological Survey Earth Forum, Houston Museum Natural Science.
An important part of the water cycle is how water varies in salinity, which is the abundance of dissolved ions in water. The saltwater in the oceans is highly saline, with about 35,000 mg of dissolved ions per liter of seawater. Evaporation is a distillation process that produces nearly pure water with almost no dissolved ions. As water vaporizes, it leaves the dissolved ions in the original liquid phase. Eventually, condensation forms clouds and sometimes precipitation. After rainwater falls onto land, it dissolves minerals in rock and soil, which increases its salinity. Rain and surface runoff are major ways in which minerals, including phosphorus and sulfur, are cycled from land to water. Freshwater (such as lakes, rivers, and near-surface groundwater) has a relatively low salinity.
The steps of the water cycle are also explained in the video below.
Human Interactions with The Water Cycle
Humans alter the water cycle by extracting large amounts of freshwater from surface waters as well as groundwater. Freshwater supply is one of the most important provisioning ecosystem services on which human well-being depends. By 2000, the rate of our water extraction from rivers and aquifers had risen to almost 4000 cubic kilometers per year. The greatest use of this water is for irrigation in agriculture, but significant quantities of water are also extracted for public and municipal use, as well as industrial applications and power generation.
Other major human interventions in the water cycle involve changes in land cover and infrastructure development of river networks. As we have deforested areas for wood supply and agricultural development we have reduced the amount of vegetation, which naturally acts to trap precipitation as it falls and slow the rate of infiltration into the ground. As a consequence, surface runoff has increased. This, in turn, means flood peaks are greater and erosion is increased. Erosion lowers soil quality and deposits sediment in river channels, where it can block navigation and harm aquatic plants and animals. Where agricultural land is also drained these effects can be magnified. Urbanization also accelerates streamflow by preventing precipitation from filtering into the soil and shunting it into drainage systems.
Additional physical infrastructure has been added to river networks with the aim of altering the volume, timing, and direction of water flows for human benefit. This is achieved with reservoirs, weirs, aqueducts and diversion channels (figure \(\PageIndex{6}\)). For example, so much water is removed or redirected from the Colorado River in the western United States that, despite its considerable size, in some years it is dry before reaching the sea in Mexico. In an extreme example, the Aral Sea in Central Asia has decreased to only 10% of its initial size after water was diverted for agriculture ( see this case study for more details ).
Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\): The California Aqueduct carries water needed for agriculture from Northern California to Southern California. Image by USGS (public domain).
We also exploit waterways through their use for navigation, recreation, hydroelectricity generation and waste disposal. These activities, especially waste disposal, do not necessarily involve removal of water, but do have impacts on water quality and water flow that have negative consequences for the physical and biological properties of aquatic ecosystems.
The water cycle is key to the ecosystem service of climate regulation as well as being an essential supporting service that impacts the function of all ecosystems. Consider the widespread impacts on diverse natural and human systems when major droughts or floods occur. Consequently, human disruptions of the natural water cycle have many undesirable effects and challenge sustainable development. There are two major concerns. First, the need to balance rising human demand with the need to make our water use sustainable by reversing ecosystem damage from excess removal and pollution of water. Traditionally, considerable emphasis has been on finding and accessing more supply, but the negative environmental impacts of this approach are now appreciated, and improving the efficiency of water use is now a major goal. Second, there is a need for a safe water supply in many parts of the world, which depends on reducing water pollution and improving water treatment facilities.
Although glaciers represent the largest reservoir of fresh water, they generally are not used as a water source because they are located too far from most people (Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\)). Melting glaciers do provide a natural source of river water and groundwater. During the last Ice Age there was as much as 50% more water in glaciers than there is today, which caused sea level to be about 100 m lower. Over the past century, sea level has been rising in part due to melting glaciers. If Earth’s climate continues to warm, the melting glaciers will cause an additional rise in sea level.
Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\): Figure 7. Mountain Glacier in Argentina Glaciers are the largest reservoir of fresh water but they are not used much as a water resource directly by society because of their distance from most people. Source: Luca Galuzzi – www.galuzzi.it
Further "Reading"
For more information on the water cycle you might want to watch this water cycle video from USGS.
Contributors and Attributions
Modified by Kyle Whittinghill and Melissa Ha from the following sources
-
Samantha Fowler (Clayton State University), Rebecca Roush (Sandhills Community College), James Wise (Hampton University). Original content by OpenStax (CC BY 4.0; Access for free at https://cnx.org/contents/b3c1e1d2-83...4-e119a8aafbdd ).
20.2: Biogeochemical Cycles by OpenStax , is licensed CC BY from Biology 2e by OpenStax ( CC-BY ). Access for free at openstax.org . - 6.6: Water Cycle by CK-12: Biology Concepts , is licensed CC BY-NC
- Biogeochemical Cycles and the Flow of Energy in the Earth System and Water Cycle and Fresh Water Supply from Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation by Tom Theis and Jonathan Tomkin, Editors (licensed under CC-BY ). Download for free at CNX .
- Water Cycle and Fresh Water Supply , Water Supply Problems and Solutions , and Biogeochemical Cycles from Environmental Biology by Matthew R. Fisher (licensed under CC-BY )
- The Water Cycle , Water Use and Distribution , and Groundwater from An Introduction to Geology by Chris Johnson et al. (licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA )
- General Microbiology Provided by : Boundless.com. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike