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This is an article about a huge salt flat in South America. This allows us to understand how salt water has affected other parts of the world.

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This video can show us what ground water is and why it is so vital to us. Next we can compare how we access water here in the U.S. to how the students think water is accessed in other countries.

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This lighthearted animation takes us beneath the surface to see groundwater in action. Watch anthropomorphized drops of groundwater travel through this system. A smiling character with a shovel digs us down to the water table, allowing us to flow through the water cycle and thus making the process much easier to understand.

This animation is part of a four-part educational series on Ground Water.

Pre-Discussion Questions for Ground Water

What is water called beneath the surface?

What are some dangers facing aquifers and groundwater?

Post-Discussion Questions for Ground Water

Why is groundwater so vital to us?

How does the water cycle operate?

Extension Activity

Name as many parts of the water cycle as you can and describe the function of each.
Possible activity: Draw a water cycle with as many parts as you can to show how they all interact, and then replay the animation to check and fill in the rest.
Compare groundwater to aquifers. How are they alike and how are they different?
How are aquifers replenished or depleted?

Links to Learn More

Interactive Water Cycle Graphic, USGS - A fun interactive water cycle diagram that describes the moving and changing forms for water.

The USGS Water Science School, USGS -Educational activity on how much water it takes to grow a hamburger.

Groundwater Facts, National Groundwater Association - 53 Billion Gallons a day used for agriculture: "Irrigation accounts for the largest use of groundwater in the United States. Some 53.5 billion gallons of groundwater are used daily for agricultural irrigation from 407,923 wells.

Size of High Plains Aquifer, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains - History and information on the Ogallala Aquifer.

A Fresh Water Story, National Geographic - Fun interactions on groundwater, surface water and other related resources.

NGSS Correlations

Performance Expectation: Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how the uneven distributions of Earth's mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are the result of past and current geoscience processes. MS - ESS2, Earth & Science Systems: Earth's Systems

Disciplinary Core Idea: The Role of Water in Earth's Surface Processes Water continually cycles among land, ocean, and atmosphere via transpiration, evaporation, condensation and crystallization, and precipitation, as well as downhill flows on land. MS - ESS2.C

Science & Engineering Practices: Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions.

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This lighthearted animation takes us beneath the surface to see groundwater in action. Watch anthropomorphized drops of groundwater travel through this system. A smiling character with a shovel digs us down to the water table, allowing us to flow through the water cycle and thus making the process much easier to understand.

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This article is about how hurricanes affect the southeastern United States. What kind of natural disasters do we deal with here in California?

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This video helps us understand the problem (scarcity of water), then encourages us to come up with creative solutions. How did people deal with this issue in ancient times? How do they do it in other countries? Students will work in small groups to come up with a solution to this BIG problem.

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In this activity, students will pretend what life would be like as a drop of water. This is a great "mirror" activity to get to know themselves and analyze some of the choices they make regarding water.

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Think about the water you drank from the school fountain today. Where do you think it came from? How far do you think it traveled in a day? A week? A year? How long do you think it's been around? In this Write Away, you'll tell the life story of a single drop of water.

You'll need:
A six-sided die

What to Do:
In this activity, you'll imagine that you're a drop of water, and write a short story about your life. We'll give you the beginning and the ending; your job is to tell what happened in between.

To choose your beginning, roll the die and take the sentence that matches the number you rolled:

1) "Once I was floating around inside a cloud"
2) "Once I was just a drop of water in the middle of the ocean"
3) "Once I was a little flake of snow on the top of a mountain"
4) "Once I was trapped in the ground underneath a river"
5) "Once I was part of a huge, thundering waterfall"
6) "Once I was lying in a puddle in the middle of a parking lot"

Now choose your ending. Roll the die again and pick the sentence that matches the number you rolled.

1) "and that's how I ended up in this lake."
2) "and then some fifth-grade kid drank me up."
3) "and now I'm just part of an iceberg."
4) "and then a dandelion sucked me up with its roots."
5) "and now I'm stuck here in this sewer."
6) "and I've been floating around in this swimming pool ever since."

Make sure it takes at least three steps to get from your beginning to your ending. In other words, at least three different things should happen to your drop of water in between the beginning and the ending we've given you.

Need more info? No problem! Just see below.

Now think again about that water you drank today. How long do you think it's been around? The answer is, pretty much as long as the Earth has! It just keeps moving from place to place, and from solid, to liquid, to gas.

If you've got your Case Journal, go ahead and answer the questions in it now!

There are all kinds of ways that water moves around and changes its form. Here are some of them:

Evaporation: When lakes, rivers, and oceans get heated up, the water rises off the surface as vapor and into the air.

Condensation: If water vapor gets high enough in the Earth's atmosphere, it can clump together and form clouds.

Precipitation: Also known as rain, snow, sleet, or hail! That's when water falls from the clouds in liquid or solid form.

Collection: There are all kinds of places where water can be stored for a long time: in lakes, rivers, oceans, and other bodies of water; in the snow on mountaintops, in the ice of icebergs and glaciers, or in the ground, where its known as groundwater. Eventually, the water can escape these places by evaporating, melting, or trickling out to another place.

Animals and Plants drink water (or absorb it through their roots). Later on it comes out, either through sweat, urine, or transpiration (something plants do thats like sweating through their leaves).

Water can also flow from one place to the next. For example, most rivers flow into oceans. Water can melt off the top of a mountain and flow into a lake. Groundwater can trickle out of the ground and into a body of water.

And dont forget irrigation: man-made systems of sewers, water pipes, and plumbing. Thats how water gets into your house, school, or a public fountain. Usually the water comes from a lake, river, or man-made body of water called a reservoir.

If you want to learn more about the water cycle, check out these Web sites:

KidZone's Water Cycle Page

http://www.kidzone.ws/water/

The EPA's Water Cycle Page

http://www.epa.gov/region07/kids/wtrcycle.htm

"Follow a Drip through the Water Cycle" (from the U.S. Geological Survey)

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/followdrip.html

"Water: A Never Ending Story"

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/pilot/water_cycle/

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Think about the water you drank from the school fountain today. Where do you think it came from? How far do you think it traveled in a day? A week? A year? How long do you think it's been around? In this Write Away, you'll tell the life story of a single drop of water.

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A quick memory that helps us to see that something as simple as drinking water can turn ugly.

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By accessing the article on the ReadWorks website, students can listen to it and slow down the audio, so it is easier for them to understand.

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Improve your students' reading comprehension with ReadWorks. Access thousands of high-quality, free K-12 articles, and create online assignments with them for your students.

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By accessing the article on the ReadWorks website, students can listen to it and slow down the audio, so it is easier for them to understand.

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Improve your students' reading comprehension with ReadWorks. Access thousands of high-quality, free K-12 articles, and create online assignments with them for your students.

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This is an article explaining how water is purified, making it safe for drinking.

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These are some facts about drinking water and how scarce it is in other parts of the world.

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WHO fact sheet on water: key facts, access to water, water and health

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This article is about a salt water sea in the Middle East. This article allows us to understand why it is called, "The Dead Sea" if it is in fact deadly, and exactly where it is located.

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Pictures of Salt Formations in the Dead Sea

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Pictures of Salt Formations in the Dead Sea

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For more visual learners, these are some amazing photos of natural salt formations in the Dead Sea.

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The Dead Sea is located in the Jordan valley bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west, and about 55 km southeast of Amman. Aside from the being the saltiest lake in the world, it is also Earth's lowest elevation on land. You have to descend 423 meters below sea level to reach its surface and shores. At 377 meters deep, it is also the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. Dead Sea has a salinity level of of 33.7%, which is 8.6 times saltier than the ocean. As much as 340 grams of salt is dissolved per liter of water. The extreme salt concentration prevents any kind of macroscopic aquatic life such as fish and plants to flourish here, though minuscule quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi are present. The water of the lake is so dense that it is impossible to sink in the Dead Sea. In fact, a popular fad among visitors is to have their picture taken while reading a newspaper and floating on the surface of the water.

The Dead Sea is fed by the Jordan river but there is no outlet. Salts have accumulated in the basin, sometimes by percolation through the surrounding earth, gradually building up over the centuries. The water contains more than 35 different types of minerals including magnesium, calcium, potassium, bromine, sulfur, and iodine. The odd chemistry results in the appearance of some striking, but transient, salt crystal formations. In shallow lagoons at periodic intervals, these formations are natural works of art: billions of charged atoms in intricate geometrical formations shaped by nature into unique works of crystalline art.

The most impressive of these natural sculptures are the "salt mushrooms" which stand on their halite or rock salt stems in shallow pools near the shoreline. Their hoods are circular to elliptical and the mushroom cap can reach up to half a meter in diameter. From afar they look like giant fungi sprouting from the water but closer inspection shows concentric rings of small, platy rectangular halite crystals with patchy crusts seated on hollow stalagmitic stems composed of what are called "pyramidical" crystals. Some formations have inverted pyramidical shapes protruding from the water, while others look like weathered columns.

Mushrooms usually begin to form on cool mornings, after periods of intense evaporation when the shallow lagoons become covered with floating rectangular halite crystals. The crystals blanket the surface of the water with an opaque, exceptionally delicate coating; the most gentle breeze can break this sheet and when it breaks, parts of it sink and the crystals attach themselves to plant debris or pebbles. Gradually, as a result, a stem of halite crystals begins to grow upwards, eventually reaching the surface where other crystals adhere to it and form the cap.
Photo credit
Because the ions and isotopes present in the water of the Dead Sea crystallize in different ways, there is a diverse array of natural formations. Hard, light-gray-to-brownish crusts of gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate) can be seen on the keels of boats, on rocks, and on ropes left hanging in the water. The comparatively large, flat polygonal plates in gypsum crystals give rise to more crusty structures by clusters of calcite (crystalline calcium carbonate) which has crystals resembling small twinned needles; these needles lock together in forms resembling blossoms of white anemones. Along the shores of the Dead Sea variations in the forms depend on how ions are arranged within the structure and whether other ions or trace elements find their way into the lattice to substitute for particles with the same charge.

Even mundane compounds such as calcium carbonate can take on a spectacular appearance when an increase in temperature, often at the end of summer, triggers mass precipitation; the result is a dramatic whitening of the water as snowy clouds of the compound slowly descend to the sea bed. Turbulence and wave motion prolong the deposition of the crystals and give the water a striking, nebulous quality.

On some occasions, sheets of air bubbles form foam like surf on the ocean. At others times, chips of asphalt decorate the Dead Sea.

In recent decades, the Dead Sea has been rapidly shrinking as increasing amounts of water are drawn off from the streams and rivers flowing into the lake and used in agriculture, mining and industry. As the water level decreases, the characteristics of the Sea and surrounding region may substantially change. With the passage of time fewer of these natural formations and phenomena of the sea will remain. Already the evaporation rate exceeds the inflow rate and eventually the whole area will become mud flats.

In 2009 a project to conserve the Dead Sea was proposed. The plan is to convey seawater from the Red Sea, desalinate it along the route to provide fresh water to Jordan, with the brine discharge sent to the Dead Sea for replenishment. The project is anticipated to be completed by 2017.

Photo credit: Baz Ratner, Reuters
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Sources: Wikipedia, Saudi Aramco World

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The Dead Sea is located in the Jordan valley bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west, and about 55 km southeast of Amman. Aside from the being the saltiest lake in the world, it is also Earth's lowest elevation on land.

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This video is an introduction to the comparison of salt water to fresh water on Earth.

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Water Water Everywhere: Crash Course Kids #14.2