This special type of evaporation is referred to as transpiration. The excess water remaining when the plant has used all it can then evaporates into the atmosphere from its leaves, flowers, or stems. As water travels beneath Earth’s surface, it can be taken up through roots to provide sustenance to plants. Let’s leave the beach and go further inland. The water that has just come through the hole you dug is part of an aquifer. Congratulations, you’ve found the water table! The water table is simply the depth at which Earth’s subsurface is saturated with water. Have you ever dug a hole in the sand at the beach? After maybe a foot or so, it starts to fill up with water. The important thing to note here is that an aquifer is always located beneath the water table. You’ll also see a well that has been drilled to gain access to the water found in the aquifer. Impermeable means the water cannot seep through it and infiltrate any deeper. You can see here that an aquifer lies beneath Earth’s surface, but above an impermeable rock. A huge amount of groundwater is stored in layers of permeable rock known as “aquifers”. Let’s focus on groundwater flow for a little bit. You can see this indicated in the diagram as groundwater flow, but it’s also known as subsurface flow. In either case, water will eventually end up beneath Earth’s surface, where it will continue to flow toward the ocean. The process of infiltration is simply the downward movement of water into Earth’s subsurface, while percolation is the downward movement of water through porous or cracked rock. You’ll see two processes called infiltration and percolation, which are very similar, but not exactly the same. But look at the cross-section view beneath the lake. You’ll notice that evaporation is happening, just as it does with any lake, pond, or any other body of water. For now, let’s go back and focus on the little lake and the area around it. In the middle of the picture, you can see a river flowing back into the ocean where, like we talked about before, the short process of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation create an infinite cycle. In this case, the surface flow leads into a little lake. Any type of surface flow will eventually find its way to a body of water whether that’s a stream, pond, lake, river, ocean, et cetera. Surface flow is any water that flows on top of Earth’s surface. If precipitation falls in places like this, where there are snow-capped mountains, the snow will continue to accumulate until it melts, at which point you’ll have snowmelt runoff, which is a type of surface flow. In either case, precipitation can be in many different forms – rain, snow, hail, sleet, and a lot of other things in between.Īlright, so now we’re over the top of the mountains in this picture. When clouds become saturated with water droplets, they may release precipitation either back over the oceans, where this short process will repeat indefinitely, or over land, where it gets much, much more complicated. Condensation is the change in the state of water from the gas phase to the liquid phase. Once these water droplets are lifted to a certain height, called the lifting condensation level, they will condense and form the clouds that we see in the sky. Water that is in our oceans is evaporated by the sun into our atmosphere. The sun is the energy source that powers this whole process. We will go into most of these in depth in a few minutes, but for now, let’s just discuss the water cycle at a 30,000-foot view starting on the left side of this picture. This diagram of the water cycle shows the majority of its phases. The water cycle is powered by the sun and showcases a continuous exchange of moisture between land, oceans, and our atmosphere. The hydrologic cycle, or the water cycle, describes the processes by which water molecules travel from the surface of the earth to the atmosphere, back to Earth’s surface over and over again. Hi, and welcome to this video about the hydrologic cycle! Today, we’ll be looking at all the different processes involved in this cycle and what effect it has on the earth.
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