April 2023
Intermediate to advanced
319 pages
8h 49m
English
The terrestrial water cycle describes how rivers, lakes, and wetlands gain and lose water. Water comes down from the atmosphere in the form of precipitation; globally, around two-thirds of this goes back into the atmosphere through evaporation. The rest restocks groundwater and provides surface and subsurface runoff, which flows down rivers into lakes and reservoirs to provide freshwater. This freshwater is critical for human life and nature but only accounts for around 2.5% of the total water on Earth (Vörösmarty, 2009).
As the human population increases, the pressures on the terrestrial water system increase; for example, the threefold increase of the global population during ...
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