The Water Cycle - Ecosystems - The Living Environment - THE LIVING WORLD

THE LIVING WORLD

Unit Eight. The Living Environment

 

36. Ecosystems

 

36.3. The Water Cycle

 

Unlike energy, which flows through the earth’s ecosystems in one direction (from the sun to producers to consumers), the physical components of ecosystems are passed around and reused within ecosystems. Ecologists speak of such constant reuse as recycling or, more commonly, cycling. Materials that are constantly recycled include all the chemicals that make up the soil, water, and air. While many are important and will be considered later, the proper cycling of four materials is particularly critical to the health of any ecosystem: water, carbon, and the soil nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus.

The paths of water, carbon, and soil nutrients as they pass from the environment to living organisms and back form closed circles, or cycles. In each cycle, the chemical resides for a time in an organism and then returns to the nonliving environment, often referred to as a biogeochemical cycle.

Of all the nonliving components of an ecosystem, water has the greatest influence on the living portion. The availability of water and the way in which it cycles in an ecosystem in large measure determines the biological richness of that ecosystem—how many different kinds of creatures live there and how many of each.

Water cycles within an ecosystem in two ways: the environmental water cycle and the organismic water cycle. Both cycles are shown in figure 36.6.

 

 

Figure 36.6. The water cycle.

Precipitation on land eventually makes its way to the ocean via groundwater, lakes, and finally, rivers. Solar energy causes evaporation, adding water to the atmosphere. Plants give off excess water through transpiration, also adding water to the atmosphere. Atmospheric water falls as rain or snow over land and oceans, completing the water cycle.

 

The Environmental Water Cycle

In the environmental water cycle, water vapor in the atmosphere condenses and falls to the earth’s surface as rain or snow (called precipitation in figure 36.6). Heated there by the sun, it reenters the atmosphere by evaporation from lakes, rivers, and oceans, where it condenses and falls to the earth again.

 

The Organismic Water Cycle

In the organismic water cycle, surface water does not return directly to the atmosphere. Instead, it is taken up by the roots of plants. After passing through the plant, the water reenters the atmosphere through tiny openings (stomata) in the leaves, evaporating from their surface. This evaporation from leaf surfaces is called transpiration. Transpiration is also driven by the sun: The sun’s heat creates wind currents that draw moisture from the plant by passing air over the leaves.

 

Breaking the Cycle

In very dense forest ecosystems, such as tropical rain forests, more than 90% of the moisture in the ecosystem is taken up by plants and then transpired back into the air. Because so many plants in a rain forest are doing this, the vegetation is the primary source of local rainfall. In a very real sense, these plants create their own rain: The moisture that travels up from the plants into the atmosphere falls back to earth as rain.

Where forests are cut down, the organismic water cycle is broken, and moisture is not returned to the atmosphere. Water drains off to the sea instead of rising to the clouds and falling again on the forest. During his expeditions from 1799 to 1805, the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt reported that stripping the trees from a tropical rain forest in Colombia prevented water from returning to the atmosphere and created a semiarid desert. It is a tragedy of our time that just such a transformation is occurring in many tropical areas, as tropical and temperate rain forests are being clear-cut or burned in the name of “development” (figure 36.7).

 

 

Figure 36.7. Burning or clear-cutting forests breaks the water cycle.

The high density and large size of plants in a forest translate into great quantities of water being transpired to the atmosphere, creating rain over the forests. In this way, rain forests perpetuate the wet climate that supports them. Tropical deforestation permanently alters the climate in these areas, creating arid zones.

 

Groundwater

Much less obvious than the surface waters seen in streams, lakes, and ponds is the groundwater, which occurs in permeable, saturated, underground layers of rock, sand, and gravel called aquifers. In many areas, groundwater is the most important water reservoir; for example, in the United States, more than 96% of all freshwater is groundwater. Groundwater flows much more slowly than surface water, anywhere from a few millimeters to as much as a meter or so per day. In the United States, groundwater provides about 25% of the water used for all purposes and provides about 50% of the population with drinking water. Rural areas tend to depend on groundwater almost exclusively, and its use is growing at about twice the rate of surface water use.

Because of the greater rate at which groundwater is being used, the increasing chemical pollution of groundwater is a very serious problem. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are key sources of groundwater pollution. Because of the large volume of water, its slow rate of turnover, and its inaccessibility, removing pollutants from aquifers is virtually impossible.

 

Key Learning Outcome 36.3. Water cycles through ecosystems in the atmosphere via precipitation and evaporation, some of it passing through plants on the way.