"All the Water in the World"
Demonstration

Show the liter bottle of water as representative of "All the water on Earth". Ask audience to guess how much of it would probably be salt water in the oceans.

Pour out 26 ml into the measuring cup, then and sprinkle salt from the salt shaker into the liter bottle, showing that the great majority of our water is salt. Mention that we don't have an easy way to turn salt water into fresh, so we only have what's in the measuring cup as "All the fresh water on Earth".

Unfortunately, not all of this fresh water is available to us. From the 26 ml in the measuring cup, draw up 6 ml into the syringe and reserve. Then pour out the pretend ice cubes into the measuring cup (so they clink), to show that 20 ml of our fresh water is frozen in the polar ice caps. It would take a lot of global warming to melt them!

So now, our syringe with 6 ml represents "All the available fresh water on Earth".

Unfortunately, some of this water is extremely hard to get, because its deep underground in the spaces between rocks. Squirt 5 ml of the water into the container with sand.

Now all that is left is 1 ml of that whole liter bottle that represents our accessible, available freshwater -all of our rivers, streams, lakes, all the freshwater we drink, bathe in and cook with.

How shall we care for it? Shall we just squirt it out without thinking? What can we do to help? We could take shorter showers, not waste drinking water, turn off the faucet when we are brushing our teeth, etc.

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Last modified 9/21/06 3:59 PM by menichol (history)
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