Water Educational Posters, Prints & Charts
for science & social studies classrooms, home schoolers, offices.

Water Resources Map 1993 National Geographic

LANDFORMS bays, gulfs isthmus & straits lakes oceans & seas river & stream wetlands

Precious Resource Water map text -

Do you know where your water was last night? Last year? Or where it's headed as it swishes across the slick surface of the sink and vanishes through a pipe? And what you've done to it while washing clothes, watering the garden, taking a bath?

As more people reach for the tap, these become pressing questions. A growing population requires more food, more houses, more shopping centers, more roads, more cars – all of which increase demands for clean, fresh water.

The 20th century has seen great changes in the way Americans use water. As the century opened, the United States government launched a massive dam-building program aimed at bringing irrigation – and people – to the West. In the decades that followed, dams were raised across rivers around the country, providing not just water for agriculture, recreation, and navigation but also protection against floods and electricity to power the industrial development of entire regions.

Large-scale exploitation of groundwater resources began in the 1930s, when new pumps and cheap power allowed a growing number of farmers to economically lift water from as deep as a thousand feet below the surface. From the Great Plains to California's Central Valley, vast regions with little rainfall assumed new prominence as agricultural land.

In recent decades Amercians have begun to feel the limits of their water supply. Pollution of lakes and streams and overpumping and contamination of groundwater sources have, in some areas, sharply reduced the available amount of fresh water. People are being forced into choices: Should we water fields or supply cities? Generate electricity or support fish habitat? Build an airport or preserve a wetland? The maps and diagrams here suggest the range of water issues confronting Americans on the eve of the 21st century.

FACTS ABOUT WATER USE

Just about anything we do or touch utilizes water. Switch on a light; water generated the power. Read a newspaper; water made the paper. Drive a car; water produced the steel. Eat a hamburger; water sustained the cow. The United States withdraws an estimated 339 billion gallons of fresh water a day from lakes, streams, and underground sources. That is nearly 10 percent less than the total used in 1980, even though the population has grown. Economic downturn, water-saving technologies, higher water (delivery) prices, and conservation efforts have stemmed water demand. Still, Americans remain among the world's biggest water users.

(1993 information - assign your students to update information.)

Hydrosphere

Poster Text: The Hydrosphere encompasses all forms of water found within the Earth's sphe 75% of the Earth is covered ncluding oceans, lakes, rivers, streams and underground water. Water can be found in the atmosphere as clouds, in the geosphere deep underground and in the biosphere inside ever living organism. Water is the basis for all life on Earth.
Water exists on Earth in all three chemical states, solid (ice), liquid (water) and gas (water vapor). Earth is the only place in our solar system where liquid water has been discovered. This gives Earth its nickname as the “Blue Planet.” The amount of water in the hydrosphere has largely remained unchanged since the beginning of time. It moves from sphere to sphere, it changes forms, taken in by plants and animals, but never really disappears.

• rivers posters

Hydrosphere: Water Cycle

Poster Text: The movement and endless recycling of water throughout the Earth's ecosystem is known as the water cycle, or hydrologic cycle. Water from the Earth's surface is taken up into the atmosphere in vapor form. The water vapor condenses to form clouds and eventually returns to Earth as rain, sleet, hail or snow, depending upon atmospheric conditions. Water is then used by organisms, or flows through rivers to larger bodies of water such as oceans and lakes.

• beverages / food posters
• aquatic creatures posters

Hydrosphere: Water Environments

Poster Text: Water is stored in the hydroshpeher in areas called resovoirs. These reservoirs include the atmosphere, oceans, lakes, rivers, soils, glaciers, snowfields, and groundwater. Water is essential for life, and many of these reservoirs provide water environments for living organisms. Wetlands, coral reefs and open oceans are examples of biomes in which water plays a major role. The tropical rainforest biome, which supports the majority of the Earth's biodiversity, dependes on rainfall to sustain its abundant life.

There are many types of watery environments. These range from freshwater ponds to salty seas, whcih contain three times the salt concentration of the ocean.

The largest water environemnt on Earth is the ocean. Oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and are responsible for producing about half of the world's biomass (the weight of all plants, animals, fungi, and microbes in the biosphere). Most organisms in the oceans live at the sunlit ocean surface. Below 25 meters there is little light to support photosynthesis for plants, which are the building blocks for the rest of the food chain.

Wetland habitats support an immense diveristy of life, from tiny microscopic organisms to reptiles, to large mammals. By definition, wetlands are lands on which water covers the soil or is present either at or near the surface of the soil. In coastal wetlands and estuaries, the salt water and tides combine to create an environment in which only salt-tolerant species (halophytes) can survive. Inland wetlands include food plants along rivers and streams. Marshes and wet meadows are dominated by grasses and other non-woody plants or shrubs, while swamps are dominated by trees.

• landforms posters

Rachel Carson Wall Poster

Rachel Carson
b. 5-27-1907; Springdale, PA
d. 4-14-1964; MD

Rachael Carson wanted to be a writer, but a college course in biology inspired her to think about a career in science.

Carson was able to combine her two loves of science and writing, raising the warning flag about the danders of pesticides that she observed were killing fish, birds, and insects. Her first two books, “Under the Sea-Wind” and “The Sea Around Us,” describe the oceans and the life they contain, but it was “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, that made her famous.

• more Women of Science posters
• Rachel Carson posters

The Silent World Poster Movie

Jacques-Yves Cousteau
b. 6-11-1910; France
d. 6-25-1997; Paris

French naval officer Jacques-Yves Cousteau was an explorer and ecologist who studied the sea and all forms of water life.

• The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey - The Complete Series, DVD

John Wesley Powell
b. 3-24-1834; Mount Morris, NY
d. 9-23-1902; Pennsylvania

John Wesley Powell is best remembered for his 1869 three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers, the first passage of European Americans through the Grand Canyon.

Powell was also the second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and proposed policies for water management in the development of the arid West, such as state boundaries based on watershed areas (to avoid squabbles).

• Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell, Pioneers of Conservation

Ed Ricketts
b. 5-14-1897; Chicago, IL
d. 5-11-1948; California (car-train accident)

Marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher Ed Ricketts is best known for Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology, and for his influence on writer John Steinbeck, which resulted in their collaboration on the Sea of Cortez, later republished as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951).

FYI - Steinbeck fictionalized Ricketts' lab in Cannery Row; Ricketts was also friends with Joseph Campbell.