The Chinese symbol for “political order” is made from the characters for river and dyke. The greatest cities are on rivers or have harbours. Ships create empires. Water is intrinsically linked with being human. We are almost entirely made of it: a human foetus is 95% water; the water content of an adult liver is 73%; that of the nervous system’s tissues is 84%. Our planet is seven-tenths water; until recently, scientists thought that water was a fundamental condition for life (though this is now seen as “chemical parochialism”). H 2 O is the only chemical formula that has entered everyday speech. We take water for granted, by thinking it ordinary, but we still don’t understand it. “Of all known liquids,” wrote the great water chemist Felix Franks, “water is probably the most studied and least understood.”

Jha sets out to give this extraordinary subject a proper biography. Don’t be misled by the introduction: although he begins by quoting the usual suspects – Conrad, Melville, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – and talks of the cultural place of water in history and religion, humans play second fiddle. Water, with its quirks and mysteries, has the starring role, not necessarily our cultural relationship with it. It’s a long read and exhaustive. After all, water is everywhere, from the oceans to our bodies to the galaxies. But we begin on Earth, with the curious fact that we still don’t know why our planet is a wet one. It shouldn’t be, having formed from planetesimals at a distance from the sun that should have made it drier. In this “dry” formation theory, water somehow landed on the Earth from space, perhaps shielded inside comets or water-rich asteroids. For the “wet” theorists, our planet’s water has come from “the rocks and ice that had coalesced to form it in the first place”.

Get used to mysteries: water is dripping with them. It is, says Jha, “weird”. For a start, we still don’t know how it freezes. One of the major puzzles of this contrary substance – the fact that hot water freezes faster than cold water in sub-zero conditions – was discovered by a Tanzanian high‑school student named Erasto B Mpemba, who “found that hot ice-cream mix froze faster than colder mix in a classroom experiment”. This mysterious property is now known as the Mpemba effect.

Jha explains why water links everyone and everything in the universe Guardian

Then we meet sea gooseberries and arrow-worms, and learn that the white cliffs of Dover are made of plankton corpses. In the biosphere, we move into water’s presence in life-forms: it makes up 97% of some marine inverterbrates, or 50% of bacterial spores. We meet the man who “discovered” water, or at least its chemical makeup – either Henry Cavendish or James Watt, depending on which side of the Victorian Water Controversy you take. In a lovely analogy, Jha compares how water gives our bodies energy to hawala, the informal lending system: just as that works on trust and word of mouth, so we are given life and energy by a cellular system that “transfers the energy and charge of one part of a cell to another at impossible speeds, via networks of hydrogen-bonded water molecules”.

Throughout the book, we return again and again to a voyage Jha took to the Antarctic on a scientific research vessel. This strand is sometimes successful, sometimes less so, but the cryosphere section is where it best comes to life, as Jha steps on ice-floes, travels across a blinding ice landscape in an amphibious buggy, and visits the huts left by a 1912 scientific expedition led by Douglas Mawson. There is science, but also Adélie penguins, ferocious katabatic winds and plenty of ice (the Antarctic is covered by 10,000tn tons of snow and ice). Other characters are left as blank as the landscape: no one is identified beyond “scientists”, or “the expedition leader”, leaving the penguins to add some colour and personality. Perhaps that’s forgivable, as the book is about the science of water, but it can – ironically – make for a dry read that often feels dutiful rather than captivating.

Jha is a careful writer, but shows an odd lack of passion about things that should surely trigger some awe and anger, such as climate change, the dreadful damage we have done to our oceans and imminent water crises. But this is no polemic. The direst of facts are delivered with a calmness that can seem flat: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and United Nations warn of a coming water apocalypse – there will be skirmishes between countries for decent access to water, they warn, and billions of people with lack of access to clean water by the middle of the century.” Reversing the ocean’s absorption of 90% of the heat caused by climate change will take our planet “an extremely long time”.

Finally, Jha visits Nasa bases, and meets the scientists who for decades have been trying to find conditions in space that could lead to life. He recounts the curious journeys of Curiosity, deliberately crashed on to the surface of Mars in 2012. It is still trundling over the planet’s surface telling us that Mars once had water, from its old river beds and furrows, and that it still has water in “ice at the poles and vast glaciers at the bottoms of shadowed craters”. This is the liveliest section, because space is amazing, and because space scientists are funny (Harold Urey, whose theory that there was water on the moon’s surface was disbelieved for decades, wrote a letter to Nature saying that people had thought these effects “are caused by other liquids, that is lava, dust-gas or ... vodka”). We come across Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn whose jets of water, named Cold Faithful – after the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone national park – are exciting possibilities for life. Regions around stars where planets may have habitable conditions are “Goldilocks” zones: not so close any water would evaporate in the heat; not so far that it would freeze.

Water molecules helped create the Earth, life on it and us. We have built our worlds, and we are ourselves built of this remarkable substance. Jha’s book is often remarkable, too. It is overlong; in places it needed more zealous editing. But it holds wonders enough that you can swim through the flaws, and into its deeps.

• Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry by Rose George is published by Metropolitan Books. To order The Water Book for £15 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.