What is Water cycle?
So it’s raining. Have you or someone close to you ever thought about where all that water stored in clouds comes from? If not, let me tell you about a very important cycle of our nature called the water cycle.
When the sun heats waters in the oceans and rivers, the water turns into a gas called water vapor and rises. This method is called evaporation. You can also see water vapor at your home. Just take some water from a container and place it on the stove. After a while, you can see clouds of gas rising. This gas is called water vapor. Therefore this is the first step of the water cycle.
When this water vapor rises, it turns into tiny droplets of water. This process is called condensation. The water vapor then mixes with other elements, such as natural gases and tiny dust particles, to form clouds.
To test condensation in your home, hold a cold lid over the vessel you used to heat the water. After a while, tiny droplets of water appear in the cold lid that you held over the vessel. It is exactly what we call condensation.
As time goes by, the cloud gets bigger. After a certain point, it cannot get any bigger and cannot hold any more water particles; therefore, it bursts open. It bursts to open into the rain, hales, or snow. This process is called precipitation. As it rains, water gets collected into rivers, lakes, and oceans and even gets collected under the soil. Thus water cycle is a continuous process. It is a continuous process of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
Do you know that even plants sweat? It happens by transpiration(exhalation of water vapor through stomata). It is why it rains more in hilly regions or forests because they contain a lot of trees and plants.
Sometimes snow directly gets converted into vapor without turning into water. This process is called sublimation. It happens a lot in cold countries.
The importance of the water cycle
All the water in our environment is recycled water. The glass of water you just drank, the amount of water you used to flush your toilet, and the amount of water you bathe every day are not newly generated. This water has always been in the atmosphere, and It is just recycled by the process we discussed above. Without the water cycle, water would not be recycled, and the amount of water on our planet would decrease. Water is life. Without water, all living things would die.
