Nilometers of Ancient Egypt

Nilometers, as the name literally suggests, were used to measure the level of the river Nile in Egypt. Nilometers  were  large structures built by ancient Egyptians along the Nile river to measure impending water rise during annual floods. The Nilometers were calibrated with markings in cubits (1 cubit is approximately 50 cms) to interpret the water level.

 

16 cubits meant the right amount for an abundant harvest, while too low or too high levels meant devastation due to famine and over flooding respectively.

 

The conical ceiling of the Nilometer at Rhoda Island near Cairo, Egypt

You can find a wonderful picture gallery of these amazing structures at Amusing Planet.

Water in Art: Claude Monet's Moulin A Zandaam

Moulin A Zandaam or Windmill of Zandaam
Claude Monet [Public domain, US-PD], via Wikimedia Commons

19th century French landscape painter Claude Monet is renowned worldwide as one of the founders of the French Impressionist painting movement.

His iconic waterscapes such as "Water Lilies" are among some of the best known and reproduced paintings in the world. This post features one of the 25 paintings that he made while staying at Zandaam in the Netherlands in the 1870s.

Water's Super States: Supercooling

Liquid water turns into solid ice at its freezing point of zero degrees C.

 

Under special conditions, water retains its liquid state even below freezing point. This state is known as supercooled water. Supercooling occurs when the temperature of a liquid drops below freezing point in the absence of seed nuclei required to create the crystal structure for a solid shape.

 

Supercooling is not a laboratory process, but occurs naturally in one of the most commonly observable phenomenon - clouds. The reaction of supercooled clouds with solid surfaces or heat from jet engines creates results in some stunning formations in nature.



Rimed post near Cairn Gorm summit in Scotland.  Compare with the picture below taken in summer.
Rime builds up in clouds when supercooled droplets (liquid water below freezing) carried by the wind impact on any obstacle and immediately freeze.
Photo By: Jim Barton [CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Cairn Gorm summit in summer
Michael Graham [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
 

 

Coral Reefs

Coral reefs are rocky formations created in marine areas by living organisms such as polyps and algae through the secretion and deposition of limestone over stony corals.

Coral reefs are built and grow over centuries into large and diverse coral reef ecosystems creating a complex habitat of aquatic plants, corals, fish and other marine species. They are sometimes referred to as "rainforests" of the sea.

Coral reefs can be found all over the world, although a majority of them exist in tropical zones.

Corals fringing the coast are a common sight but barrier reefs are largest and most impressive are of them. Barrier reefs are like large, continuous mountain ranges, separated from land by lagoons.

Australia's 2,000 km long Great Barrier Reef is visible from outer space
Image courtesy NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team

 

Water in Wild - 3

Humpback whale - Megaptera novaeangliae - breaching. NOAA's Ark - Animals Collection
Image: NOAA

Deepest Spot on Earth: Challenger Deep in The Mariana Trench

Mount Everest in the Himalayas is the highest mountain peak on Earth, standing tall at 29,000 feet or approximately 5.5 miles from sea level. The Earth's oceans at some points are deeper than the highest mountain peaks. Deep under the oceans run mountain ranges, peaks, valleys and trenches as awesome in scale and variety as those above land.

The deepest known underwater point is Challenger Deep, in the 1500 mile long Mariana Trench which is one of the known deepest and longest underground trenches. Challenger Deep is 7 miles below sea level and can easily submerge Mount Everest.  At this depth, the water pressure is intense and temperatures at sub-zero, beyond the reach of sunlight.



Deep Challenger in Mariana Trench
Kmusser [GFDL , CC-BY-SA-3.0  or CC BY 2.5 ], via Wikimedia Commons

While marine life is found even at these unfathomable depths, it is very difficult for humans to descend there. Till date only two manned expeditions have been made to Challenger Deep.

From Visually

 

The first expedition was made in 1960 and second and most recent expedition, Deep Sea Challenge, was made by Hollywood film maker and undersea explorer James Cameron in collaboration with the National Geographic in 2012.
 

Seasons's Greetings Feature: Christmas Island

 

Imagine a beautiful island as a Christmas gift from Santa Claus! Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, is called so because it was first discovered by an English ship that sailed past it on Christmas day in the seventeenth century.

 

With numerous endemic species thriving in its forests and surrounding ocean, the island is often referred to as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. With a tropical climate, and December temperatures in the eighties (F), Christmas Island sounds like an ideal destination for a winter vacation as well.

 

Ancient Aqueducts

Aqueducts are bridges or pipes used to transport water. Aqueducts were used in human civilization from ancient times, as early as 2 BC.

Ancient aqueducts were constructed to transport water through channels by its natural downward movement through gravity. Aqueducts ran underground, over the terrain and even in the form of viaducts or bridged arches across valleys.

Ancient Romans were masters of aqueduct engineering, constructing spectacular aqueducts some of which exist even today.



Pont Du Gard, one of the oldest Roman Aqueduct stands tall at 49m over river Gardon near Nimes in South of France
By Wolfgang Staudt (originally posted to Flickr as Pont Du Gard) [CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons"

Head  over to Encyclopaedia Britannica for more information on ancient as well as modern day aqueducts.

Water in Art: Riverscapes



 Painting - In Mouth of the Volkhov River, by Russian artist Nikolai Galakhov
Nikolai Nikolaevich Galakhov [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Unique Properties of Water

Water has many unique properties that make it force that sustains life in this world.

A nice scientific explanation of its dozens of unique properties  can be found at Dr. Michael Pidwirny & Scott Jones University of British Columbia's physical geography website and UC Davis ChemWiki. YouTube is full of student and serious research photos as well.

For a quick demonstration, these everyday videos highlight two of the commonly known properties of water.

Water is a Universal Solvent
Water can dissolve the most substances i.e. solids and liquids.





Water has Surface Tension
Water molecules are cohesive towards themselves and can create an elastic like layer on the surface of water as they pull themselves inwards in the form of a sphere. Surface tension enables some solid objects, denser than water to float and sometimes stride on the surface.



 

Water and Life: Acquatic Ecosystems

As a source of life, water sustains an immense variety of life around and within it on Earth. 

Water based ecosystems are called aquatic ecosystems.

Saltwater and freshwater support entirely different ecosystems. There are multiple types of acquatic ecosystems on Earth.

Marine Ecosystems present in 71% of Earth's salwater i.e. oceans and sea.

Colorful underwater landscape of a coral reef

Freshwater Ecosystems which have different variations depending on the type, flow and presence of water in the ground.

River Ecosystems in flowing rivers and water bodies.





Salmon fish in river

Lake Ecosystems in lakes, ponds and other contained water bodies.

 

Tundra swans in a lake with mt shasta in the background

Wetlands created by seasonal or permanent saturation of water in and around the ground.

 

Flooded Wetlands

Water in Wild - 2

Image: Hidden Ocean 2005 Expedition: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration

The Color of the Sea

Water is a colourless or rather, a pale blue liquid.

Large water bodies like the oceans and seas get their distinct hues from reflecting the sky.

Algae, plankton, plants and sediments in water among other things, give different water bodies other distinguishing hues such as yellow, green and even red.

Four seas of the world are named after colours - the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the White Sea and the Yellow Sea. The name of the Black Sea refers to the North direction  than the actual colours of its water!

To check out all possible shades of the sea, head over to CITCLOPS or Citizens’ Observatory for Coast and Ocean Optical Monitoring who offer an interesting colour wheel to check out different shades of sea water on their website.



Shades of the Sea
Images from Unsplash
 

 

How Much Water is there on Earth

The Earth is filled with water, in liquid form, which makes it unique in the solar system.

Water occupies 71% of Earth's surface, giving it its beautiful blue appearance when seen from space.
 Only 29 percent of the Earth's surface is land.  

Earth's Western and Eastern Hemispheres. NASA image.

Of  all water on, around and under earth is  only 1/100th or 1% is available as surface freshwater that is needed for sustaining human life.

The Earth is full of water but is it filled with water.  This popular illustration from USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) shows the stark contrast.

Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS/illustraion by Jack Cook, WHOI

There are three blue spheres in the image. The largest sphere shows the total amount of water, the smaller one, total freshwater and the smallest, freshwater in rivers and lake.

This is the complete USGS study on water on Earth and more.

Ancient Stepwells of India

In ancient times, stepwells were used in arid regions of Western India to enable people to reach groundwater that was deep underground. A fascinating and intricate feat of engineering and architecture, these wells had galleries and stairwells reaching all the way down to the water level.





Chand Baori (stepwell), Abhaneri, Rajasthan, India
By Doron (Own work) GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chicago journalist Victoria Lautman spent several years, studying and photographing 120 steps across 7 Indian states. Photographs of her collection which include a mesmerizing helical well and palace structures are featured in many publications.

Human Expressions of Water: Art

Human beings have expressed their integral relationship with water in a number of forms.

The earliest human civilizations grew and thrived around sources of water.

Man has built and expressed his relationship with this element in a number of ways - through art, engineering and culture.

 Hovhannes Aivazovsky, a 19th century Russian painter is considered one of the greatest seascape artists is history. "The Ninth Wave" featured below is widely considered to be his best work.

The Ninth Wave By Hovhannes Aivazovsky (1817 - 1900) (Russian)
(Painter, Details of artist on Google Art Project) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Hydropower: Water as Renewable Energy

Water is one of the best and largest natural sources of renewable energy on this planet.

The kinetic energy of moving water can be converted among other things, into mechanical energy or electricity.

The natural water cycle i.e. conversion of water to vapour, clouds, rain and back aided by gravity causing water sources such as rivers to flow down to sea level, create many natural sources of flowing, falling water.

The force of this water, also known as hydropower, can be used to drive machinery or generate electricity. Water mills and dams are some of the common means of utilizing hydropower.

This 4 minute video on hydro-electricity generation from U.S. Department of Energy explains it all.

References and More Information:

1. Top 10 Things You Didn't Know about Hydropower, from Department of Energy.

2. Why HydroPower, a site created by a group of renewable energy enthusiasts.
 

Water in the Wild - 1

Water's Special Properties: 3 States

Water has one of the rarest properties exhibited by substances. It can be found naturally in all three different states.

• Liquid
• Solid
• Gas

Think about it. Oxygen is gas in its natural form while gold is solid and oil is liquid.

There are very, very few substances in nature which are as common as water and yet found in all three states.




Water and Ice



Steam rising from a hot water spring surrounded by ice
Image: Andreas Tille License CC BY-SA 4.0

 



Water in Different Languages

How is water pronounced in different languages?

Click on the Translate toolbar to your right and check out the blog title.

If this sounds trivial, consider the next time you are thirsty and do not speak the local language.