Water on Earth
About this fraction (or percentage) of the Earth is covered in water.
What is three-fourths (or 75%)?
This primary heat source drives the entire water cycle.
What is the Sun?
When water evaporates into the air, it changes into a gas called this.
What is water vapor?
How water returns to Earth from the atmosphere in the form of rain, snow, or hail.
What is precipitation?
Once water makes it all the way through the cycle, it does this.
What is starts the cycle over again?
97% of the water on Earth is this type, making it undrinkable for humans.
What is salt water?
The warmth from the sun causes water to turn from a liquid into a gas, a process known as this.
What is evaporation?
The process where water vapor cools and turns back into a liquid droplet.
What is condensation?
When a cloud becomes heavy, this invisible force pulls the water droplets down.
What is gravity?
Any amount of water that has been collected in one place like lakes or oceans.
What is accumulation?
Only this small percentage of Earth's water is fresh water.
What is 3%?
When water evaporates into the air, it leaves these behind, making atmospheric water cleaner than ground water.
What are impurities?
Along with tiny water droplets, these tiny solid pieces join together to help form clouds.
What are dust particles?
Melted snow or rainwater that flows downhill across the land surface.
What is runoff?
The process of water soaking from the surface down into the ground.
What is infiltration?
2% of Earth's water is frozen in these two icy formations.
What are glaciers and ice caps?
When a parcel of air is heated by the Sun, it does this, causing its density to decrease.
What is expand?
As altitude increases high in the atmosphere, this happens to the temperature.
What is it decreases (or gets colder)?
Water found in rivers, lakes, and streams above ground is known as this type of water.
What is surface water?
The process where moisture is carried through plants from roots to small pores on the underside of leaves, where it changes to vapor.
What is transpiration?
The total amount of water on earth is always this, Because it it continuously recycled. Fluctuating because of evaporation condensation and precipitation.
What is the same amount?
This is the specific scientific term from your diagram for the energy coming from the Sun.
What is solar radiation?
When air cools high in the atmosphere, water molecules lose energy and increase in this, causing them to change from gas to liquid.
What is density?
Water found underground in the cracks and spaces in soil, sand, clay, and rock.
What is groundwater?
A physical state change: from a gas (vapor) back to a liquid.
What is condensation?