It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {What-A-Cycle!}

See below for a special announcement!

***

A week ago, Frannie was in Cincinnati meeting with science educators and curriculum developers for the National Science Teaching Association regional conference. While she was there she met Dennis, a climate scientist from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was handing out a water cycle modeling activity called "What-A-Cycle"!

Frannie thought the idea was so clever but she knew she wouldn't have the time do it because she had to get ready for Groundwater Week. She reached out to her friends at the Groundwater Foundation, knowing we'd be excited to share this craft with you today.

WHAT-A-CYCLE Water Cycle Paper Craft
You'll need:

• Scissors
• Glue or Tape
• What-a-cycle paper craft worksheet
• Colored Pencils/crayons/markers (optional)

STEPS:

1. If you printed out a Black and White copy or an unlabeled copy of the What-a-cycle paper craft worksheet, you should first color it and label all the parts of the water cycle.

2. Cut out the atmospheric portion of the water cycle and then cut out the ground portion of the water cycle. You should now have 2 separate pieces.

3. Fold the lettered tabs and along the marked lines on the ground piece and start to form a 3-D version of the groundwater and runoff portions of the water cycle. Once you start to see how the flat version transforms into 3-D, glue or tape the tabs together to form the model.

4. Fold along the dotted line in the atmospheric portion of the water cycle so that the largest precipitation cloud is at a right angle to the rest of the background.

5. Glue or tape the 3-D groundwater portion of the model to the atmospheric section of the model to complete the activity.

Frannie has been blogging about the water cycle a lot these past couple months.Go back to review her water cycle blogs first, and then trace as many paths a water droplet can take as you can find. What parts of the water cycle deep dives are shown in this model? What parts are missing?

Let her know by email or through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Special Announcement!!

Catch Frannie next week on Facebook in a very special addition of "Water-Wise Wednesdays" as she completes the Groundwater Foundation Scavenger Hunt in the Groundwater Week Exhibit Hall! Frannie is excited to introduce you to several companies who make it possible for her (and her friends at the Groundwater Foundation!) to share the importance of groundwater through education.

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {Hydro Van Gogh}

Express your artistic side and follow a water drop's journey through the ground in a fun activity called Hydro Van Gogh! An aquifer is an underground geological formation of sand, soil, gravel, and rock able to store and yield water. The water from an aquifer is called groundwater and it is the water we drink and the water that grows our food. Find out more!

Here's what you need:

• Aquifer map and/or an aquifer model
• Canvas panels (recommended 5" x 7") or large sheets of paper
• Oil pastels or acrylic paint 
• Paint brushes
  
  
  

Here's what you do:
1. Identify the different parts of an aquifer using the graphic below:

2. Set out the canvas panel or a large sheet of paper, paint, and paintbrushes.

3. Now, pretend like you are a water drop that lands on the ground and seeps into an aquifer. Paint what you see as the water drop. Get as creative as you like!

Optional extra: continue to paint your journey through the water cycle.
What would you see?
How many different pathways through the water cycle will you take?
What kinds of materials will you interact with?

Be sure to share your masterpiece at home with your family. Share what you know about groundwater and how to protect it!

Send pictures of your paintings to info@groundwater.org.   

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 9 - Recharge}

This is the ninth and final part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater, discharge, surface water, evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff.

Welcome back to Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle! The final, red-colored bead on Frannie’s water cycle bracelet represents recharge, which is the process by which an aquifer takes in water. If you think of an aquifer like a phone battery, you know that when you use your phone, the battery gets depleted. In order to make your phone work again, you have to connect it a power source and charge it. Surface water, run off, and precipitations are kind of like power sources for an aquifer. Water seeps, or percolates, through the ground, recharging the aquifer once it reaches the water table.

The ability of an area to perform recharge depends on many factors like the type of soil and how well it can hold water, how much rain an area receives and where it fall, how steep the hills are in an area, and climate of an area during each season. For example, if rain falls on a steep city street, it won't be able to pass the impermeable pavement and will flow quickly downhill. However, if it lands in a flat area that has a type of soil that water can pass through quite easily, the water can infiltrate the unsaturated zone to reach the water table.

Frannie learned something interesting while researching recharge. Not all water that enters the soil actually becomes recharge. Much of it is stored in the unsaturated zone and returns through the atmosphere either through evaporation or by being drawn into plants’ roots and then transpired. This is in part due to water’s stickiness superpower from the deep dive into condensation.

But that’s not the only way that groundwater can be recharged. Human-induced recharge is water that is put back into the ground on purpose. Wells that do this are called injection wells, but it can also be directed into spreading basins. A spreading basin is an area that holds surface water long enough for it to seep into the ground, such as a wetland or marsh.

Groundwater recharge and the processes that allow it to happen are very important to the health of an aquifer. If too little recharge occurs over an extended period of time, such as in times of extreme drought, the aquifer can shrink. The sheer weight of the land can compress the dry soils and form impermeable barriers and the aquifer will never be able to return to its previous size. This is aquifer storage loss, a concept Frannie explored while “Seeing an Aquifer in Space”. 

Now that our water droplet has returned to groundwater, Frannie has completed this cycle. This isn’t the only loop a water droplet can take.

Sometimes, a water droplet with travel from the surface, condense and precipitate, land on a leaf and evaporate again before it ever has the chance to touch the ground.

Sometimes, water flowing in river will exchange back and forth with the groundwater flowing beneath the riverbed.

And sometimes, water will be pumped from the ground into your house, through your faucets and toilets and shower, treated in a septic system, and eventually released back into the ground.

Thank you for traveling with Frannie on her journey through the water cycle! She learned a lot along the way and hopes you did, too!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 8 - Runoff}

This is the eighth part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater, discharge, surface water, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

Welcome back to Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle! The green bead on the water cycle bracelet represents runoff. When rain falls, snow melts, or when Frannie’s friend accidentally leaves the hose running in the garden (oh no!), the water that flows over the land and into the sewers, rivers, and lakes is called runoff.

A watershed is an area of land that surrounds a basin of water, such as a river or lake, that collects the runoff. Watersheds can be as small as the little neighborhood that surrounds and drains water into Frannie’s pond or huge, like the Mississippi River Watershed that drains water from 31 U.S. states and two provinces in Canada.

Runoff often picks up pollutants as it flows over the land. Not only can this affect the ecology in the area, but it can also have serious effects on local surface water and, eventually, the reservoir or ocean where it ends up.

Sometimes, precipitation doesn’t make it all the way down to earth. For example, when it rains in a Frannie’s neighborhood, the rain can be intercepted, meaning it lands on the buildings, sidewalks, streets instead of the grass or garden. The water that flows down the side of the street eventually runs into storm drains, which transport the water to a drainage area. Some water may even seep into the ground in a process called recharge!

Join us next time as Frannie explores recharge, the final stop on her water cycle journey.

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 7 - Precipitation}

This is the seventh part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater, discharge, surface water, evaporation, and condensation.

Welcome back to Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle! The yellow bead on Frannie’s water cycle bracelet represents precipitation. Even though it’s a big word, we are all very familiar with many different kinds of precipitation like rain, hail, sleet, and snow!

Precipitation is water that falls from the sky. The tiny water droplets are big enough to form visible clouds but not yet big enough to fall. Precipitation happens when millions of cloud droplets collide together to form a single raindrop or through another process where ice crystals are rapidly formed into snow or hail.

One quick clarification, though: fog and mist are not types of precipitation. They are actually suspensions, which means that the water vapor has not condensed enough to precipitate.

Precipitation is not the only way water can move from the sky to the ground. Back when Frannie was investigating evaporation, she touched on the concept of sublimation, where solid forms of water can become vapor without ever entering the liquid phase.

Deposition, or desublimation, is the opposite of that. In sub-freezing air, water vapor can turn directly into ice. It’s very possible you’ve already seen this process in action. On very cold winter days, water vapor goes through process of deposition to become the frost, also known as hoarfrost, that you can see coating plant stems, spiderwebs, and wires.

Join Frannie next time as she finds out where all that water goes once its back on the ground!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 6 - Condensation}

This is the sixth part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater, discharge, surface water, and evaporation.

Welcome back to Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle! Condensation is represented by the white bead on Frannie’s water cycle bracelet. Before we can understand condensation, we have to look at one of water’s coolest properties.

Water droplets have 2 amazing superpowers. The first one is called “cohesion”, which means that the molecules like to stick together. You can see this water property in action with a very simple experiment.

1) Fill a glass of water to the rim.
2) Once it looks full, continue to add water drop by drop.

Even though the water is technically over the rim of the glass, it isn’t spilling because the drops are cohering to each other.

A water droplet's second superpower is known as "adhesion", which means that molecules like to stick to other things. You can see this water property in action in another very simple experiment.

1) On a warm day, fill up a glass with ice and water.
2) Leave it out on a table for a few minutes.

Observe the water that collects on the outside of the glass. The glass isn't leaking - water vapor from the air is cooling down and sticking, or adhering, to the outside of the glass.

After water vapor rises into the air, it starts to cool and seek out non-gaseous particles, known as Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCNs). When water vapor makes contact with CCNs, it adheres. It then cools and transitions from vapor to liquid droplets, as clouds would have in low and intermediate elevations, or solid ice crystals, as clouds would have high up in the atmosphere. Clouds grow when more water molecules cool and cohere together in the process known as condensation.

Condensation is an exothermic process, which means it releases heat. Convection, which is movement of a fluid in response to heat, and advection, which is the movement of a material that is suspended in a fluid such as a CCN, are two other important processes at this stage in the water cycle.  They are responsible not only for carrying clouds over the ocean and land, but also for our next step in the water cycle – the precipitation of water from the clouds.

Join Frannie next time as she heads back down to the ground with precipitation!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 5 - Evaporation}

This is the fifth part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater, discharge, and surface water.

Welcome back to Frannie’s deep dive into the water cycle! The dark blue bead on Frannie’s water cycle bracelet represents evaporation. Evaporation is the process of a liquid being heated up until it turns into gas. As Frannie described before, we can actually see the process of evaporation happen when we hold a cup of hot chocolate and see the steam rising from the cup. On a larger scale, when the sun heats up surface water, some of the water molecules on the very top layer turn into gas and rise into the air.

Evaporation doesn’t just happen in surface water, though. Soil moisture is an important measurement in agriculture and environmental science. Plants draw moisture up from the ground to use in photosynthesis and water vapor and oxygen are released from plant leaves as by-products of that process. Water that is released from plants is called transpiration.

Farmers and scientists alike calculate total soil moisture loss by combining moisture evaporation from soil and transpiration to find a total rate of evapotranspiration. Evapotranspiration tells farmers when they should irrigate their crops and helps scientists understand and anticipate droughts.  Many factors can affect evapotranspiration such as temperature, humidity, and the type of plant that is transpiring water.

There is still another way that water can move from the ground into the sky. When Frannie learned about glaciers and their role in the water cycle during her deep dive in surface water, she also learned about a process called sublimation. Sublimation is when a solid becomes a gas, totally skipping the liquid phase and it occurs at low air temperatures and pressures.

We can easily see the progress of sublimation if we look at dry ice. Dry ice is solid carbon dioxide, which wants to be in its gaseous state at our normal air temperature and pressure. If Frannie wears gloves and carefully places a small chunk of dry ice in a cup and leaves it out in a room, she will notice that it gets smaller after a few hours even though there is no liquid carbon dioxide in the cup.

Glaciers that are located high up in the mountains can do the same thing as dry ice, but it takes a lot longer. They slowly reduce in size through a combination of sublimation and melting then evaporation. Together, scientists describe the process of glacier volume loss as ablation.

Join Frannie in the clouds next time as she explores condensation and water’s amazing property of adhesion!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 4 - Surface Water}

This is the fourth part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blog on the overview of the water cycle and her deep dives into groundwater and discharge.

Welcome back to Frannie’s deep dive into the water cycle! Today’s focus is surface water. Frannie knows that groundwater refers to water under the ground, so surface water must refer to the bodies of water above the ground, on the surface of the earth. Streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans are all examples of surface water.

Frannie’s experiment with the Awesome Aquifer Kit and her deep dive into the discharge process taught her that surface water is connected to groundwater. Streams and rivers can exchange water droplets that flow with the main current with water droplets that make up the subsurface flow, or flow beneath the streambed.

While Frannie wasn’t surprised by her research into streams and lakes, she was surprised to find surface water hiding in wetlands and glaciers! Wetlands, like marshes and swamps and bogs, are very important locations for groundwater recharge, which Frannie will talk about more later.  Wetlands near the sea or ocean can be flooded and drained by tidal activity and become salt marshes. All kinds of wetlands are incredibly important to prevent flooding and protect water quality.

Frannie has never seen a glacier, but in her research, she learned that she could think of it as a large river of ice that flows downhill under its own weight. When areas have a lot of snowfall in the winter start to warm up, the snow begins to melt and compress itself. If an area receives more snow than it can melt away, the melting snow turns into ice and grows with more cycles of snowfall and partial melting, eventually forming a glacier. Glaciers have an enormous effect on the topography, or layout of the land, in a region as well as its quantity and quality of available water.

Join Frannie next time as she follows the water cycle from rivers, wetlands, and glaciers to the sky. See you then!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 3 - Discharge}

This is the third part of Frannie’s exploration of the water cycle. Please check out her previous blogs on the overview of the water cycle and her first deep dive into groundwater!

Welcome back to Frannie’s deep dive into the water cycle! Today’s focus is discharge, represented by the black bead on her bracelet. Discharge is simply groundwater moving out of the ground into another stage of the hydrologic cycle.

A common type of discharge is through the springs that feed creeks, streams, and rivers. These springs can sometimes provide baseflow, the water that keeps streams flowing even during the hottest and driest weather. There are several kinds of springs, such as the seepage springs Frannie just described. Other types include fracture springs that discharge water from openings in impermeable rocks, tubular springs that discharge water through underground caverns and tunnels, and “wonky holes” which is an Australian term for freshwater springs that open up into the sea.

Plants also take a small part in the discharge stage of the water cycle.  Plants draw water up through their roots using water’s gravity-defying superpower of capillary action.  This process is called plant uptake.  Water is drawn up through the stems, stalks, branches, and trunks of the plants to reach the leaves where it is needed to help the plant make its own food in photosynthesis.

One of the coolest things Frannie discovered during her research on the water cycle surrounds something called subduction. Subduction is actually part of the recharge process, which Frannie will revisit later with her blog on recharge, and is a part of how mountains and volcanoes form. When the water gets heated up by the earth’s mantle, it turns into a vapor and becomes highly pressurized.  Volcanoes will sometimes vent this vapor or, in massive eruptions, push magma and ash high into the sky with from the force of the pressure.

Join Frannie on the next stop on her journey – surface water! See you then!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 2 - Groundwater}

Welcome to the first stop on Frannie’s deep dive into the water cycle! Today’s topic, and the first bead on the water cycle bracelet, is groundwater!

Groundwater is the water beneath the surface of the ground that fills the spaces in the soil and gravel.  An aquifer is a collection of groundwater that’s held within a permeable layer of rock, sand, or gravel.  Aquifers can lie a few feet below the ground and be recharged with rain and floodwaters (Frannie learned that these are called unconfined aquifers) or be hundreds or thousands of feet inside the earth, trapped for hundreds of years beneath an impermeable layer like shale (confined aquifers).

Aquifer storage capacity is the amount of water that an aquifer’s material can hold when it’s totally full. When an area experiences a lot of long, severe droughts and the sands, soils, and gravel settle, an aquifer can lose its ability to hold as much water as it once could.  Reread the “Seeing an Aquifer from Space” blog Frannie wrote a few weeks ago for a quick refresher on storage capacity and storage capacity loss.

Perhaps one of the coolest things about aquifers and the groundwater in them is the flow! Groundwater certainly moves down through the ground from the surface, but did you know it also flows horizontally? Like a river, groundwater will flow “downhill” or down the slope of layers that make up the aquifer. Unlike a river, groundwater takes much longer to travel. A drop of water in a river might be able to travel up to 7 feet in one second, but a drop traveling through the ground might take a couple of days to travel the same distance.

These time of travel calculations are very useful to hydrogeologists when they need to predict how quickly groundwater will move and where it’s going.  Flow direction and time of travel can be affected by many things, including different points of discharge, which just happens to be the next bead on the bracelet!

Next time, Frannie will talk about different kinds of discharge and share the really cool connection between groundwater and volcanoes. See you then!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {The Water Cycle: Part 1 - An Overview}

The water cycle is probably something that you’ve already learned in school. You know that water goes into the sky, forms a cloud, and then comes down as rain or snow to re-enter the earth and do it all again.

But the water cycle isn’t as much of a circle as you might think. Sometimes a water droplet might go through a plant, into a glacier, or even enter your body when you take a drink on a hot day.

Frannie wants to take a closer look at the different parts of the water cycle over the next few weeks to get to know all the different paths a water droplet can take, but before we can do that, we should review the basics.

Do you have your water cycle bracelet you made two weeks ago? Great! You can use that to follow along as we review the parts of the water cycle.

Frannie’s bracelet starts with an orange bead, which means our first stop will be groundwater. Groundwater is the water that’s underground. It fills the empty spaces between gravel and soil and is found in many different soil layers. In the next blog, Frannie will dive down into those layers and talk about aquifers, storage, and flow.

The next bead is black, which represents discharge. When we’re talking about the water cycle, discharge simply means that groundwater leaves the ground and enters another part of the water cycle.  Many people know that groundwater discharge is connected to rivers and oceans, but did you know that it’s also connected to volcanoes?! Frannie can’t wait to show you how!

The third bead is light blue and represents surface water.  Defining this one is easy because it’s the water we see around us in puddles on the sidewalk, lakes, and in the ocean. But as you might know, surface water is intertwined with all parts of the water cycle. Frannie will swim through all kinds of surface water to show you just how strong those connections are.

Evaporation is the dark blue bead that comes next on the bracelet. Evaporation is the process of water going from a liquid state into a gaseous state. You can actually see evaporation happen when you make a cup of hot chocolate. When you mix hot water and hot chocolate mix in your cup, you still have the liquid form that makes up the hot chocolate that you drink. The steam that rises from the top is also water, but it’s been heated to the point that it turns into a gas.  Frannie will share a little bit about how the sun heats and evaporates surface water, but she is excited to also dive in to the lesser known processes of “evaporation” from plants and mountains.

Condensation is the white bead, chosen because the largest collections of condensed water float in the sky above our heads: clouds. Condensation has to do with one of water’s unique properties of adhesion, or stickiness. Water molecules really like to adhere, or stick, together. After the water vapor has risen into the sky, it cools down and is drawn together to form a cloud. But clouds don’t just stay in one place. If they did, it would be raining over the oceans all of time. Frannie wants you to help her explore how water is transported through the clouds.

The yellow bead represents precipitation, a part of the water cycle we all know and love.  Precipitation is a fancy word to describe any kind of water falling from the sky onto the ground. It’s rain! It’s snow! It’s hail and sleet and mist! Frannie will look at different types of precipitation as well as spending some time with a peculiar way water gets from the sky to the ground, a process called deposition.

The second to last bead, green this time, is our runoff bead. Runoff is water that drains or flows off of something, like when it rains on the top of hill and the water flows quickly towards the bottom. But what happens when precipitation doesn’t land on the ground or on surface water? What happens if it a rain drop falls on a leaf on the top of a tree or a snowflake stays on your eyelashes? Frannie isn’t sure, but she’s excited to find out.

The last bead on Frannie’s bracelet is red and the last blog in this series will talk about recharge. Recharge sounds like a confusing topic, but Frannie has a helpful analogy to clear it up for you. Imagine you have a phone that is at 100% battery. That phone is like an aquifer that’s completely full. When you use the phone, the battery storage is slowly used up. Using up energy from your phone battery is similar to when groundwater is discharged from an aquifer. When the phone battery gets low, you have to refill the battery. How do you do that? You charge it! Recharge is the process that refills groundwater so that it’s there for us to use again and again.  Recharge can be done naturally, like when rain seeps and percolates through the ground below. Frannie has also heard about something called artificial recharge, so she’ll do some research on that too.

So that’s the water cycle! It’s a bit longer and more complicated than you might have originally thought, but Frannie is excited to go on this learning journey with you.

If you’re excited to learn more about the water cycle, let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!  See you next time when Frannie gets into groundwater!

It's Water-Wise Wednesdays with Frannie the Fish! {Water Cycle Bangles}

Water cycle bangles have become popular accessories at recent science fairs and environmental festivals. Today, Frannie will help you make your own.

The water cycle describes all the pathways a water drop can move through the atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere (air, land, and water systems). There are many steps to the water cycle, so making a water cycle bangle will help you remember them all!

Here's what you will need:

• A Pipe cleaner (or string, twine, strip of leather, etc.)
• 7/8" pony beads in eight different colors (2-3 beads of each color)
• A Water cycle illustration (there is one provided below)

Instructions:

1. Review the water cycle vocabulary.  Each word represents a different stage of the water cycle.  Check out Frannie's water cycle post to get familiar with vocabulary terms.
2. Assign each vocabulary word a different color bead.
3. Pick a place in the water cycle illustration below to begin your journey.
4. Twist a loop on one end of the pipe cleaner or tie a knot in the end of your string. This will prevent the beads from sliding off the end.
5. Add a bead to your pipe cleaner and decide where to go next.  Use the water cycle illustration above to help you decide.  Remember if you start in a cloud you can't directly go to the lake, you must first become rain (or another form of precipitation: Can you name one?)
6. Each new place traveled will earn you a new bead.
7. After you have completed the water cycle a few times, connect the ends of your pipe cleaner to create a bangle bracelet to wear!

Frannie loves her bangle!  Now if someone asks her about it, she can share what she learned about the water cycle!

This activity is featured in the Let's Keep It Clean - "Brownie" Girl Scout Patch guide book. By completing two activities from the booklet you earn your Ask Me About Groundwater patch.  Get inspired and do more to earn your Let's Keep It Clean patch!

BLOG: Earth Science Week and Groundwater

by Jennifer Wemhoff, The Groundwater Foundation

October 14-20 is Earth Science Week. Organized by the American Geosciences Institute annually, the week helps the public better understand and appreciate Earth sciences and encourages stewardship of the earth.

Groundwater should be an important component and focus of the Earth sciences, and learning about it can be a fun way to celebrate Earth Science Week. Here are a few fun activities to help you discover more about groundwater and how it fits with Earth science.

1. "See" groundwater with an Awesome Aquifer Kit.
Build your own working aquifer model and "see" groundwater. The kit includes six advanced groundwater demonstrations - groundwater terminology, its role in the water cycle, the makeup of an aquifer, contamination, and clean up.

2. Growing with Groundwater.
Create a mini terrarium that demonstrates the different phases of the water cycle, and learn about the four basic elements needed for plant, animal, and human survival (soil, water, sunlight, air).

3. Aquifer in a Cup
Create a mini aquifer model with just some gravel and/or sand, a clear cup, and water. Learn cool groundwater terminology - water table, saturated zone, unsaturated zone.

4. Water Cycle Bangles
Water is constantly moving around, through and above the earth as a gas (water vapor), a liquid, and
as a solid (ice). This never ending process is called the hydrologic cycle. Make a bracelet and learn how water moves.

5. There's No New Water
Learn how much water is on the planet and where it's stored. You may be surprised to learn that groundwater and fresh water make up a very small percentage of the Earth's total water supply!

Want to find more hands-on activities? Check out of online activity library and search by age, topic, duration, and more. Earth Science Week also has an online toolkit with a variety of resources - posters, data, lab activities, and other science-focused tools.