Space Whiz: Water Cycle (Final Exam)

(A)The sun drives the water cycle. It heats water in oceans and seas. The water evaporates as water vapor into the air. Ice and snow can go directly into water vapor. Air currents take vapor up into the atmosphere where cooler temperatures cause it to condense into clouds. Air currents move water vapor around the globe, cloud particles collide, grow, and fall out of the sky as precipitation. Precipitation may fall as snow or hail, and can accumilate as ice caps and glaciers, which can store frozen water for thousands of years. Most water falls back into the oceans or into land as rain, where the water flows over the ground as surface runoff. A portion of runoff enters rivers in valleys in the landscape, with streamflow moving water towards the oceans. Groundwater is stored as fresh water in lakes. Not all runoff flows into rivers, much of it soaks into the ground as infiltration. Transpiration is the release of water vapor from plants and soil into the air. Water vapor cannot be seen.(1)

(B) All land masses feed into a body of water. Water cannot travel uphill, all watersheds are determined by topography. Watersheds very greatly in size, depending on the highest points surrounding it. A watershed can be thousands of square miles, or can be a few acres draining into a pond. A watershed is more than just a piece of land that collects the rainwater and dumps it into the river. Anything that ends up in a watershed ends up in a body of water. (2)

(C) A flood is an overflow of an expanse of water that submerges land. A flood is defined as a temporary covering by water of land not normally covered by water of land not normally covered by water. Flooding may result from the volume of water within a body of water, such as a river or lake. These overflow or break levees with the result of water going outside the perimeter that it's normally within. Rill erosion is the development of small "ephemeral" concentrated flow paths, which funtion as both sediment source and sediment delivery systems for erosion on hillslopes. Where water erosion rates on disturbed upland areas are greatest, rills are active. Fluids such as wind and water, as well as sediment flowing via gravity, transport previously eroded sediment which loses enough kinetic energy in the fluid, is deposited, building up layers of sediment. All of these are sometimes interuppted by construction. For example the Sycamore Creek in Holt Michigan, was moved by people to put in the new highway U.S 127.(3)