Flow video

Polution and Pesticides
In this video, they showed how people all over the world are affected from unhealthy water. They showed how pollution like pesticides and viruses are harming people, especially children, every day. In fact one in ten children will die before the age of five mostly because of unhealthy water. And 30,000 people die every day, but it would only cost 30 billion dollars to get clean water for the entire world, but we spend three times that on bottled water!

Profit and Poverty
Big companies are getting a large profit off bottled water like Nestle, who owns 70 bottled water brands. 100 billion dollars is spent on bottled water worldwide yearly, and they are making dams to hold all the water that is demanded, creating poverty for thousands of people. Actually, more than one million people were displaced (forced to move) in china because of dams. Sadly, lots of those people needed that land for agriculture, which uses 70 percent of water, while only 10 percent is used by us.

Poison, Pesticides, and Power
Pesticides also poison and harm people a lot. Atrazine is the main pesticide used, and it causes lots of diseases like breast cancer. But all over the world there are birth defects and fertility problems, and in the last 5 years, fish are changing gender, so that there are too many females and not enough males. Power is not a good enough reason to do these things to people in my opinion, but it still happens. Did you know that 40 percent of stomach flues come from water? And if we are 70 percent water, we need to do something!

Freshwater DVD

We watched a DVD about freshwater and the importance of it. In the DVD four kids wrote a song about freshwater, and one of their lines was "it's melting away it's wasting away I need it there's no doubt about it". In my opinion they were talking about the glaciers and Cryospheres. Did you know that 70% of all freshwater is frozen? and it is melting unusually fast, which has a lot of bad effects, like more danger for people around them and lower amount of water especially in El Niño, which is the warming pattern, opposite of La Niña, which is the cooling pattern.

Another quote is “it’s what we’ve got it’s all….that’s it” which makes sense. Even though the water goes through a cycle, and you can recycle water, it still is something we can’t live without. And the majority of water (97% to be excact) of water is saltwater and not drinkable. Therefore, we must try to conserve water as much as we can, because water is not getting larger in amount. One way to see if water is fresh and good quality though, is looking for bio-indicators like stone flies or mayflies, which need lots of dissolved air in the water, and have it at a cold temperature.

Even though it doesn’t seem like it, we use large amounts of water daily. And Canada has 7 % of the only 3% of freshwater available. Imagine how different it would be if you were in a different part of the world and you didn’t have the luxury to use 130-170 litres of water just to wash your clothes! Or to have 600 dams to hold water when there is a lack of precipitation. But really, even though we have lots of water, it is passed to oceans which have currents like the global conveyor belt which carries water all around the globe. So, overall, every drop really does count.

The Importance of Currents

Ocean Currents are really important for many reasons, for example, they circulate the water all over the world and not only do they help reduce shipping costs and fuel consumption, but also effect the weather and moisture of the places. For example, the Gulf Stream is a warm current that is originally from the Gulf of Mexico, but it moves north to Europe. The sea surface temperatures are warm which keeps places warmer that are at similar latitudes. The Humboldt Current also affects the weather but this is a cold current so it keeps the coast cold. It is off the coast of Chile and Peru. Trash and debris can get caught in these currents and even icebergs can be moved. The Labrador Current which goes south out of the Arctic Ocean is famous for moving icebergs into shipping lanes in the North Atlantic.

I personally already mentioned the Gulf Stream and Humboldt Current in my previous blog and also I made a connection about the fact that it affects the temperature and moisture.

I wonder if the currents are effected when they cross paths, because not only are there so many smaller currents, but also the Global Conveyer belt too. Does that affect the other currents, seeing as it travels all around the globe?

Ocean Currents

Ocean currents are horizontal or vertical and have two kinds. Surface and Deep water currents. The surface current, by the way, is in the upper 400 meters of the ocean which is 10% of all the water in the ocean, where as the deep water currents are found below 400 meters and is 90% of the ocean!

Surface currents are mostly caused by wind as it moves over water and creates gyre (which is a spiral pattern). Gravity also helps because where the water meets land, the water is warmer and the two currents converge. That is when gravity pushes the water and creates the currents. In the northern hemisphere gyres move clockwise, but in the southern they go counter clockwise.

I ocean currents are important because the ocean currents help the circulation of the earth's moisture, for example, humidity and rain. It also helps resultant weather, and water pollution. The friction and wind is a really important part of the making of the currents.

Here are some examples of some really strong, important currents like the Humboldt currents in the pacific, the Gulf Stream and Labrador Current in the Atlantic, and so on.