Small portions of water occur as groundwater (1.7%), in the glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland (1.7%), and in the air as vapor, clouds (consisting of ice and liquid water suspended in air), and precipitation (0.001%). Water covers about 71% of the Earth's surface, with seas and oceans making up most of the water volume (about 96.5%). The gaseous state of water is steam or water vapor. When finely divided, crystalline ice may precipitate in the form of snow. Clouds consist of suspended droplets of water and ice, its solid state. It forms precipitation in the form of rain and aerosols in the form of fog. "Water" is also the name of the liquid state of H 2O at standard temperature and pressure.īecause Earth's environment is relatively close to water's triple point, water exists on Earth as a solid, liquid, and gas. The hydrogen atoms are attached to the oxygen atom at an angle of 104.45°. Its chemical formula, H 2O, indicates that each of its molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, connected by covalent bonds. It is vital for all known forms of life, despite not providing food energy, or organic micronutrients. It is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, and it is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a solvent ). Water is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula H 2O. A spatial network of lake-isotope records, however, could be used to separately assess the influences of these multiple factors.Clouds in Earth's atmosphere condense from gaseous water vapor. Our results suggest that paleoclimate reconstructions based on single isotope records could therefore be confounded by multiple factors (i.e., changes in air mass, seasonality of precipitation, temperature, or evaporation). We found that the extent of evaporative enrichment in lakes is controlled by local hydrology and is not directly tied to climate or elevation. From the lake-water input compositions, on plots of oxygen versus hydrogen isotopes, evaporative enrichment of individual lakes follows regionally coherent evaporation trends (0.96 < r 2 < 0.99). river-water isotopic data, which are biased toward winter precipitation, and the paradigm that lakes represent the annual moisture surplus. These results contrast with published western U.S. In areas associated with the summer monsoon in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, lake-water inputs are skewed toward summer precipitation. Our results show that the isotopic composition of lake-water inputs is correlated with the isotopic composition of annual precipitation. To improve our understanding of lake-water isotopes, we analyzed the δD and δ 18O values of water from a hundred lakes in the western United States across a broad range of seasonal precipitation regimes. However, the effects of seasonal drought and the seasonal distribution of precipitation on lake-water isotopes are not well documented. Lake-water isotopes can be used to track moisture regimes and water sources at present and in the geologic record.
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