The Story of Water

Have you ever thought where water comes from? I don’t mean your glass, a water bottle, or even the tap. I mean, where did it come from? Maybe we can also consider, when.

Let’s look back in time – a long, long time ago, to the time of an early Earth, about 4 billion years ago, a time well before life existed on what would become our lush and verdant world. Imagine a shard of ice, immense, weighing millions of tonnes, trapped in a comet hurtling through the cold and blackness of space. Let’s look closer at that shard, at just one of those water molecules, two atoms of hydrogen bonded to an atom of oxygen – H₂O.

The comet, one of millions such comets of that time, impacts violently and cataclysmically with the young Earth, releasing superheated steam and rock into the atmosphere. Trapped within the gravity of  the planet, our water molecule is inexorably bound for the next several billion years, to our small nook in the solar system. It is one of countless other water molecules, blanketing the atmosphere of our young world until the planet cools enough for the steam to condense as clouds and rain into early lakes, rivers, and oceans. Warmed by sunlight, it would rise as vapour, condense back into clouds, and fall again as rain, in a cycle repeating countless times.

Then one day, around 3.5 billion years ago, our molecule of water finds itself slipping through the membrane of a microbe, flowing into the chemistry of emergent life itself. From there, our molecule’s journey through the years, centuries, millennia, and epochs gets even more astounding.

Imagine it taken up by a fern in a prehistoric jungle. A beetle greedily eats its leaves, ingesting our molecule of water. The beetle, unaware of the reptile stalking it, is devoured. That same reptile the next day becomes the meal of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The water molecule courses through the veins of the mighty beast until the day comes that this fierce apex predator itself succumbs to the inevitability of time. Its decomposing body releases back into the earth that from which it was made, including our water molecule. Soon, plants grow amongst the earth now fertilized by the T-Rex. A root from one of those plants finds its way through the damp soil and draws up our water molecule.

The cycle continues, the water moving from ground to plant and back, evaporation and transpiration in an endless dance through ages. Clouds are formed, which drop their moisture thousands of miles downwind, as a stream, to a lake, to an ocean, into a fish, which is caught and consumed by a carnivore, perhaps a carnivore such as a primate that had not long ago learned to walk upright, make rudimentary tools, and perhaps experienced the first stirrings of language and culture.

Imagine our molecule of water moving from that fish to this early human, coursing through the veins, then being released by the body in death, back to the earth, to the clouds, and over and over.

Through ice ages and warm periods, through the rise and fall of mighty civilisations, this same molecule of water has been breathed by emperors, peasants, livestock, and crops, and has travelled the world. It may have been as wine in Caesar’s cup, the blood spilled into the soil of one of the battlefields in one of our species many wars. Maybe it’s fallen as sweat from the brow of a slave on a plantation in the American South, or as a teardrop of joy as a smiling mother holds her newborn infant. Maybe it was part of a droplet in a cloud moving lazily through the sky, as lovers observe it from a blanket in a grassy field, or maybe shot from a hose as your neighbour  waters their garden.

Tomorrow it might be rain striking your window as you try to sleep, or part of the juice of a freshly picked tomato – perhaps one your neighbour gave you. Eat that bounty from the garden, and it becomes part of YOU, finding its way into cells in your body.

In every sip, or breath, or fall of rain, whisper of green leaves in a summer breeze, every tear shed in sorrow or joy, every cup drained or meal finished, every cloud in the sky, every lake, river, or glacier, every living thing, plant or animal exists in molecules of water that have flowed through time, recycled, reused, and never wasted.

The journey of water is timeless and never ends. It’s part of a timeless story, carrying with it memories of comets, dinosaurs, civilizations, and people, both famous and unknown, and is very much part of YOU. It is precious, and so abundant, yet so vulnerable to the follies of man. It’s my hope that we all can be stewards and caretakers of this precious stuff of life.