Save Water: Some Facts And Importance of Water

Table of Contents:

1. What is water?
2. Why is ocean salty?
3. What is Hydrological cycle or water cycle?
4. What is water pollution?
5. What are effects of water pollution?
6. What is water conservation?
7. How can we conserve water?
8. What is a dam?
9. Why do we need dams?
10. What are type of dams?
11. What is hydropower?
12. How is hydroelectric power produced?
13. What are floods?
14. What is a drought?

What is Water?

Water is life. You can live without food for more than a month, but cannot only live without water for more than a week. In some organisms, (like jellyfish!) up to 90 % of their body weight comes from water.  In human body, nearly 60 % is water - brain is composed of 85 % water, blood is 79 % water and  the lungs are nearly 80 % water.

• Water covers nearly 75 % of the earth's surface. But 97 % of it is in the oceans and only 3 % of the earth’s water can be used as drinking water. However, major part of it is either frozen in the polar ice caps or locked up in soil. Thus the water that can be utilized by us is only 0.5% of total water on the earth's surface.

• The total water supply of planet earth is 1335 million cubic km. It simply means that if we can construct a cubic box of length, breadth and height of 1 km  each, we will require 1335000000 such boxes to store all the water. Amazing ! Is’nt it?

• About 13000 cubic km of water, mostly in the form of water vapor, is in the atmosphere at any one time. If it all fell at once, the Earth would be covered with only about 25 mm of water.

• Each day, 1150 cubic km of water evaporate or transpire into the atmosphere.

• Of the freshwater on earth, much more is stored in the ground than is available in lakes and rivers. More than 8,000,000 cubic km of fresh water is stored in the earth in comparison to about 150,000 cubic km of water stored in lakes, inland seas and rivers. Most of groundwater is within a km of the earth’s surface

• About  18,000,000 cubic km of water found in glaciers and icecaps, mainly in the polar regions and in Greenland.

Courtesy: Central Water Commission