These student materials complement the Water Science and Society Instructor Materials . If you would like your students to have access to the student materials, we suggest you either point them at the Student Version which omits the framing pages with information designed for faculty (and this box). Or you can download these pages in several formats that you can include in your course website or local Learning Managment System. Learn more about using, modifying, and sharing InTeGrate teaching materials.

Water Distribution on Earth

Where is water distributed on Earth?

Earth is often called the "Blue Planet", because of its abundance of liquid water. As we've already covered in Module #1, this water is distributed in the oceans, ice caps and glaciers, surface water (streams, lakes, and rivers), groundwater, soil moisture, the atmosphere, and in biomass. However, these reservoirs of Earth's water are not static; water is constantly fluxing between them. We see this transport of water every day, for example in the form of flowing rivers, rain and snow, and groundwater springs.