ENDLESS LOVE: THE WATER CYCLE FOR KAYAKERS

Winter 2008

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Bryan Nichols

Earth? The third rock from the sun? What kind of names are these? I much prefer the Blue Planet, which is less about my favorite color than it is about how “Earth” really looks, at least on the surface. Indoors, in cities and inland, it’s easy to forget we live on a planet that’s mostly covered in liquid water (over 70 percent). As kayakers, we’re always on the lookout for interesting bits of water to dip our paddles into. But how much do you really know about H2O? Are all 6 or 7 billion of us using it up, or are rising sea levels going to submerge us? Kayakers should know more about water than landlubbers, so let’s take a quick dip into the water cycle.

Water Water Everywhere...
We often hear about water shortages and even water wars. How can we not have enough water when we live on a planet that’s mostly covered in it? The ancient mariner provides us with a clue after he makes the mistake of killing an albatross. Apparently, pointlessly killing seabirds is bad luck, and his ship gets becalmed. As everyone aboard slowly dies of thirst, Coleridge treats us to those oft-repeated lines:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The morbid (and poetic) irony of dying of thirst while floating on an ocean of water is a lesson to consider, especially since we are presently driving about 17 of the 24 species of albatross to extinction. To ensure a healthy supply of drinking water, even on a planet covered in water, we have to know something about the water cycle. This is literally a matter of life and death. Poorly managed water cycles result in more than 3 millions deaths a year, most of them children. Unfortunately, we’re raising generations, at least in North America, who don’t know much more than “clean water comes from a tap or bottle; dirty water goes down a drain.” As kayakers, boaters, voters, and as ecologically aware citizens, we need to know more.

From Here to Eternity
The thing about water is, we don’t use it up. It’s a renewable resource. A cycle. Round and round that water goes, from clouds to creeks to carrots to our kidneys, and one way or another, it leaves us to join the cycle again. Water gets around using those “tion” words that you might remember from weather reports or high school. Let’s start with a hot day at the beach, appropriate conditions for sea kayaking. As the sun warms the sea surface, we get—you guessed it—evaporation. The magic of the water cycle is that when liquid water evaporates into water vapor (a gas), it can defy gravity and rise high up into the sky. Well, it’s not really magic, it’s physics, and as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. Before it comes back down, it needs to become liquid again. So after evaporation we get condensation, where water forms tiny droplets or ice crystals that become clouds. Our next “tion” is precipitation, and down comes the water, falling as rain, snow or something in between. If it falls back into the ocean, we’re back where we started. If it falls on land, things get more complicated, much to the delight of those kayakers who like rivers.

There are a couple other “tions” appropriate to water on land, including percolation (when water sinks into the ground) and transpiration (when plants take up water through their roots and emit it as water vapor). What’s important though, is that water keeps going around in the cycle over and over, powered by the sun and gravity. When you drink a glass of water you don’t use it up—you merely turn clean, fresh water into dirty, salty water. In this sense, we’re drinking the same water molecules our ancestors did, and the same ones the dinosaurs did. It just keeps going around the water cycle. The tiny percentage of Earth’s water that we can drink gets desalinated (by evaporation perhaps) and cleaned (by percolation, wetland filtration, etc.) along the way.

Water and Weather
We hear about droughts and floods all the time in the news, as the water on our blue planet shifts around. Global climate change won’t change the amount of water on earth—but it may change where it falls, where it travels, and how much of it is available. The water cycle is powered by sunlight and gravity, but the tilt of the earth is important to how that water moves around. Things like tropical evaporation rates, seasonal monsoons and deep sea currents all add to those complicated weather patterns that decide how much rain falls where, and that rainfall has a profound effect on life. Climate changes have caused societies to collapse all over the world. We might be getting better at predicting climate change, but we seem to be getting better at causing it as well. As the world warms, the water cycle will continue—hopefully we’ll be able to adapt to the changes.

Kayaking the Water Cycle
Kayaks roam the edges of the planet’s giant water cycles because we move at or near the interface of land and water. The atmospheric sections of the cycle are pretty much inaccessible to kayakers, as are the ocean depths. Up in the sky, clouds and humidity contain only a tiny fraction of the amount of water on earth (.001 percent), but they’re critical to movement in the cycle. Kayakers don’t take to the skies too much, and we are rarely, if ever, completely submerged. Both events, should they ever happen to you, tend to be as memorable as they are brief. Surf is typically involved. Kayaks don’t often get into underground water either, though I have paddled in numerous springs and floated through limestone caves in an inner tube.

Kayaking starts on top of the land when precipitation either percolates into the ground or becomes runoff. Runoff starts small—sheet flow, drains, creeks and streams. It doesn’t need to get much wider than a kayak before intrepid river kayakers are going with the flow. Unless the geography cuts it off, gravity pulls surface and ground water towards the oceans. With occasional stops for ponds and lakes, streams become rivers, rivers flow into estuaries, and fresh water mixes into the oceans again. There’s great kayaking in all of those places, sometimes by just following one river to the sea. Speaking of oceans, there are about 860,000 kilometres worth of coastline on so-called “Earth.” One of the best ways to appreciate the Blue Planet’s ever flowing water cycle is to visit as many parts of it as you can with a kayak. How many have you paddled?