Class Response #2- Water Cycle Activity

Last week in class, a student from Rutgers did an activity with us in class to teach us about the water cycle and how humans interrupt it. First, we talked about the water cycle. Basically, water is evaporated into the air from lakes, oceans, and other bodies of water. The evaporated water travels up through the atmosphere and is stored in the clouds. Once the clouds are full, it rains and the water falls back into bodies of water. The cycle repeats itself over and over again. However, humans take water for ourselves and disrupt the water cycle. To learn how this works, students were all given an index card that said either " spoon (assigned tub of water goes here) " or " cup (dump into tub of water) " . The tubs of water were labelled Aquifer, Reservoir, Ocean, Industry, Plants & Animals, Rivers & Lakes, and Agriculture. If your card said spoon, you had to take a spoonful of water out of the assigned tub of water and dump it into a cup. The people who were cups, or clouds, collected the water and then dumped them into a tub. This showed how at the end of the first part of the activity, the water levels hadn't really changed much. That was because the water was distributed almost equally between all of the tubs. For the second part, though, " human (big cups) " were added to the activity. The people who had the big cups had to take water out of the Aquifer and dump them either into Agriculture or Industry (human-related tubs). At the end of this part, the Agriculture and Industry containers were nearly overflowing! This shows how much humans use of our Earth's water. This activity was great in showing the water cycle and how water travels and is used everywhere.