The water cycle is the ______________________ movement of water from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back to the ocean.
What is "continuous?"
(I will accept other words with the same meaning, such as "unending.")
What is a river system?
The path that a stream follows.
What is a channel?
The process by which material is laid down or dropped by rivers or streams.
What is deposition?
Two ways to control flooding.
What are dams and levees?
The process that takes place when water vapor cools and changes into water droplets that form clouds in the atmosphere.
What is condensation?
The area of land that is drained by a water system.
What is a watershed?
The measure of a stream's change in elevation over a certain distance.
What is gradient?
Deposits of heavy minerals and sediments that are dropped at places in a river where the current slows down.
What are placer deposits?
The process by which soil and sediment are transported from one location to another by river, wind, rain, ice, and snow.
What is erosion?
The downward movement of water through pores and other spaces in soil due to gravity.
What is percolation?
Areas of higher land that separate watersheds from each other.
What is a divide?
The amount of water that stream carries in a given amount of time.
What is discharge?
A fan-shaped mass of sediment deposited at the mouth of a river.
What is a delta?
A rock's ability to let water pass through is called this.
What is permeability?
When water from the oceans and the earth's surface changes into water vapor.
What is evaporation?
A stream that flows into a larger stream or river.
What is a tributary?
The materials carried by a stream.
What is load?
This deposit occurs when a fast-moving mountain stream flows onto a flat plain and deposits sediments.
What is an alluvial fan?
The large amount of water that is located with the rocks below Earth's surface.
What is groundwater?
Where the energy that drives the water cycle comes from.
What is the sun?
The four stages of a river.
What are youthful, mature, old and rejuvenated?
The three types of load a stream can carry.
What are suspended load, bed load, and dissolved load?
This is formed when a river overflows its banks and deposits a layer of sediment across the area surrounding it.
What is a floodplain?
This underground area is found beneath the water table.
What is the zone of saturation?