We don’t seem to know exactly how water originated on earth. Some scientists suggest that extraplanetary sources (comets, meteoroids etc) might have brought water to the earth’s oceans. More recent data indicates that water was likely present during the early formation of earth or approximately 4.8 billion years ago. When the planet’s surface cooled some 3.8 billion years ago, the gaseous form of water condensed into rain to form the oceans. So earth was borne as a wet planet. Regardless of fully knowing its origin, without water, life would not exist on earth. Our body is mostly water (60-65%). Our blood is over 80% water, our brains and heart about 73%, our skin 64%, and our muscles are 79% water. My son at his birth was 78% water. When I look out my office window at the Willamette River during a beautiful spring or summer day at the Willamette River and wish that I was kayaking downstream towards Albany, perhaps that wish is somewhat driven by the fact that I am mostly water and the longing to be on the river is just a natural inclination to join with all the other H2O molecules rushing down the river channel.
We mostly think about water when we don’t have it. I have never been without access to water for any great periods of time. On a few foolish occasions I neglected to carry water, and a desire to find it quickly rose in importance. During a late fall car camping trip in the Virginia Appalachians in my early twenties, the water at the remote camp ground was shut off for the season, and we had forgotten to carry water so my girlfriend and I drank warm Doctor Pepper sodas for a day or so until we decided to flee the camp ground to find water. On a backpacking trip near Glacier Peak in Washington, I had the great idea that we could lighten our loads by dumping most of our water because I thought for sure that there would be many opportunities to find streams along the route. A six hour uphill climb without finding much water did not start the journey out very well.
Human civilization, regardless of whether we were hunter-gatherers or settled agriculturists or urban dwellers, has depended on the availability of water. However, the evolution of human societies into densely populated, permanent settlements fundamentally changed our relationship with water particularly with the need to irrigate large agricultural operations to supply these settlements with food. Humans have performed some amazing feats of engineering to find and secure water. Irrigation channels to bring water to agricultural fields were built in the Jordan Valley approximately 8000 years ago. By AD 1300, The Hohokam civilization in central Arizona had built 700 miles of irrigation channels to sustain developing urban centers. The Romans built magnificent aqueducts to supply water to a million residents in Rome. Water still flows through some of these aqueducts today. The Assyrians engineered an inverted siphon into their Nineveh Aqueduct 2700 years ago, a construction feat not replicated until 1860 in New York City. What we have yet to discover is a reliable way to engineer the ocean currents or the wind patterns that push storm clouds through our atmosphere, or the rains that fall on our farm fields or the winter snows that typically cover the Sierra and High Cascade Mountain Ranges.
The United States Geological Survey estimated that in 2005 the United States extracted about 410 billion gallons per day from groundwater (20% of the total) and surface water (80% of the total). Approximately 50% of the water was used by utilities, 11% for public use, 4% for industrial use, and the remaining 35% for mining, agriculture, and livestock. The scarcity of freshwater has become a crisis in parts of the world including California which produces a vast array of vegetables, fruits, and nuts for our consumption. California far outranks other states in terms of agricultural production so I don’t know what we can expect from a potential future without adequate water for these foods.
Water has been a primary migratory pathway for moving life around our planet. Islands and continents have been populated by species arriving on clumps of vegetation or logs. Humans constructed papyrus rafts, canoes, skin boats, and wooden sailing ships to journey across waters to settle new lands, transport goods, and pull food from life in the water. I have a great love of oceans, bays and estuaries. Part of my life was spent in houses overlooking Chesapeake Bay, Quoddy Narrows (Lubec, northeastern Maine), and Northeast Harbor (Mount Desert Island). I sailed up the Inside Passage of Alaska on a two month journey to Glacier Bay and Sitka Island visiting various hidden coves and broad bays, and sailed home to Seattle along the edge of the continental shelf. The 65 foot ketch that I traveled on was a small speck in a large ocean, but a different kind of seafaring journey than the human migrations down the northwest coastal waters in fragile watercraft during the late Pleistocene.
Blog Post by:
Michael Pope, Executive Director
