Monday 14 July 2014

Thinking About Water

A scientist on the television tonight said that the Earths Oceans arrived 4.4 billion years ago. Now i distinctly remember my science teacher explaining to a class of bored 12 year old's that water can be in one of three states, frozen, liquid or a gas.
So water is either locked up in ice at the poles, sloshing about with whales peeing in it as oceans or floating above us as clouds or steam and the water goes through this cycle again and again with no new water being added or any taken away.  
My question then is the cup of tea that i am drinking as i write this, is the water i used to make it 4.4 billion years old?
My second question then is if it is 4.4 billion years old, it has obviously been through the full scale of  what water can be, so it has been a cloud, part of a sea, in rivers, steam and in peoples toilet cisterns and also inside people and then expelled as urine.
In that case how many peoples and other creatures bodies has my cup of tea been through before i drink it and  after i expel it, where will it go after the sewer spits it out into the English Channel and how long before it ends up in another persons cup?
I'm suddenly not that thirsty.

4 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

Phew, the science teacher never told us that. Well, he may have done but it was the 80s so i was probably thinking of George Michael or Simon Le Bon and missed it.

What's up with my air apart from the pollution?

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

I just looked up chemical composition of air and it has 0.000114% Krypton.
I am starting to think those Superman films may not be true, he couldn't live here and breath in Krypton.