Watery conundrums

Watery conundrums

Musings
Sonia Kelly

I’M really happy to see a report on some research concerning the drinking of water. You know the way we’re supposed to drink something like eight glasses a day in order to remain healthy? Well, it now transpires that this is only a myth and that the feeling of thirst alone determines when the body requires liquids. As I’ve never complied with the dictum, I am now no longer burdened with guilt.
But could the spurious eight-glass belief responsible for the fact that a bottle of water has become an essential accoutrement for modern society? The previous generation apparently found no need for to imbibe vast amounts of water, and there is no record of anyone passing away from dehydration. My own system rebels against what it considers a surfeit of water by taking a fit of sneezing, so that one sip too many and I feel like I’ve got pneumonia.
Rivers present a different sort of puzzle to me – where does all the water come from? Think of the vast amounts of it that pour incessantly along the world’s huge waterways like the Amazon and the Ganges and countless others. Does the rain produce all that volume? But nowhere does it rain all the time or so abundantly... Does it well up from underground? – But from what vast reservoir? And how did it get there?
And it’s all rushing into the sea. So why do the sea levels not normally rise? OK, so evaporation takes place. But how come the amount of water that evaporates exactly equals the amount then replaced by the rivers, keeping the levels constant? Another thing: Is the amount of water on the planet going to diminish as it warms up, contra to all the doom-and-gloom news reports about melting-ice-cap-related flooding? Is it all going to evaporate, and, if so, where does the vapour go? Perhaps there is a specific ration of water that remains somewhere within the atmosphere.
The extraction of oil from the bowels of the earth raises another question: What replaces it? Mustn’t there be enormous cavities where it came from? Do these remain empty, so that the earth’s crust is balanced over space and about to cave in? Do they fill up with water? If the latter is the case, then enormous reservoirs must exist beneath the surface, waiting to be sucked out as the desert encroaches, more essential than what it has replaced.
But what happens when it in turn is removed and empty spaces return, ready to receive us as we topple in?
Then, you have to wonder, what exactly is water? Our bodies are supposed to consist mostly of water. Solid water? It’s hard to envisage solid water, apart from ice. Our flesh seems to burn fairly easily, too, unlike real water. Or ice. A weird set-up, if you ask me.
Perhaps, considering our watery nature, it will be easier for us to adapt to the flooded areas of the future rather than the desert ones. Indeed, maybe it is our destiny to return to the sea like the recently-discovered ancestor of the whale. Apparently, this creature, called Indohyus, once lived on the land, but at some stage shifted into the water, gradually losing its hind legs and hair and developing powerful tail fins and flippers. Hopefully it will take a while for the new landscape (or seascape) to come into being, giving us humans time to adapt – like 50 million years. Otherwise, we may just drip-dry in the desert heat.
This may, or may not, be a significant sign of things to come, but for years I have had a recurring nightmare of floods. They can take the form of rivers, marshes, high tides…but I’m always just trying to get through them. Mostly I succeed or wake up before actually drowning. It may mean that water certainly is my nemesis – either internally or externally.