Responses (3)
Regarding earth’s atmosphere, note what God said, as recorded in the Bible some 2,700 years ago: “The pouring rain descends . . . from the heavens and does not return to that place, unless it actually saturates the earth.” (Isaiah 55:10) How succinctly that describes the hydrologic, or water, cycle! Water vapor in the clouds condenses and precipitates as rain, which “saturates the earth.” Solar heating causes moisture to evaporate and “return to that place,” or the atmosphere, to start the cycle again.
A mere 3 percent of the world’s water is fresh, not salty. Almost all of that fresh water—about 99 percent of it—is locked up in glaciers and ice caps or is deep underground. Only 1 percent is readily accessible to humankind.
Basically, the total amount of water on earth neither increases nor decreases. Science World states: “The water you use today may have once quenched the thirst of a dinosaur. That’s because all the water we have on Earth now is all we’ve ever had—or will ever have.”
This is because the water in and around the world endlessly circulates—from the oceans to the atmosphere, to the land, into the rivers, and back to the oceans again. It is as the wise man wrote long ago: “All streams run into the sea, yet the sea never overflows; back to the place from which the streams ran they return to run again.”—Ecclesiastes 1:7, N
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