The Water Cycle

💧 The Water Cycle

Here is a secret: Earth never gets new water. The water in your glass has been cycling between ocean, sky and land for four billion years.

☀️ Evaporation

The engine of the whole cycle is the Sun. Every day it lifts enormous amounts of water off the oceans — invisibly.

Sun heats the ocean

Warmed water molecules escape the surface as vapor — a gas you cannot see, rising with the warm air.

Water becomes vapor

☁️ Condensation

High in the sky it is freezing cold. The vapor cools and turns back into tiny liquid droplets — that is condensation.

Vapor cools high up

A cloud is nothing more than billions of those droplets floating together. A big fluffy cloud can weigh as much as a hundred elephants.

Droplets form clouds

🌧️ Precipitation

When droplets bump together and grow too heavy to float, down they come — as rain, or as snow when it is cold enough.

Rain and snow fall

Mountains are water towers: snow piles up in winter and melts slowly all summer, feeding the rivers below.

Mountains catch snow

🏞️ Collection

Water that lands runs downhill, gathering into streams and rivers, always finding its way back to the sea.

Rivers return to sea

Some of it soaks underground instead, filling the gaps between rocks — a hidden reserve that wells and springs bring back up. Then the Sun lifts it all again.

Groundwater soaks deep