Crested Butte Magazine - Winter 2021/22

By George Sibley

There’s nothing like dry times to make us think about water. For most of us, access to water is so convenient (it comes out of a faucet) that it’s easy to take it for granted – until we’re told that there’s cause to start worrying about it.

Thus our awareness of water is usually worrying about it, which is too bad; it’s worth contemplating in itself – here on our planet that, had we seen the planet first from a satellite’s perspective, we would probably have named “Water” rather than “Earth.”

The first thing to think about is the fact that we live on a planet at just the right distance from our sun to enable water to exist 88

simultaneously in its solid, liquid and gaseous states – the three lives of water. A few million miles farther from the sun, toward Mars, our water would all be frozen in its solid state. A few million miles closer to the sun, the water would all be a gaseous cloud mass suffocating the planet. In neither of those situations could life as we know it exist; all life on the planet depends on water in its liquid state.

It’s also worth noting that all of us land-based life forms depend entirely on a very small portion of the planet’s water. Most of Planet Earth’s water – 97 percent – is too “salty’ with dissolved solids for land-based life; we need “freshwater,” distilled as vapor

from the salty oceans, then drifted in clouds over the land, condensing as it cools, and dropping as nearly-pure precipitation. But at any given time, only two to three percent of Earth’s water is freshwater – and two-thirds of that in the present age is “frozen assets” in glaciers and ice sheets, remnants of much larger “solid water” masses caused by a mere wobble and tilt in the planet’s relationship to the sun.

Most of the remaining third is invisible groundwater, some of which is accessible for plants through roots and for humans through wells. But the visible liquid water we think of as “our water resource” – the rivers and