MAIN FEATURE
Where does all the water go?
This beautiful, tiny, yet amazing island we live on that straddles the North Sea on one side and the Atlantic on the other is battered by so many types of weather – wind, rain, storms, frost, hailstones, mist, fog, sea frets, black ice, snow and, just occasionally, glorious sunshine and warmth.
Having four seasons in a year (and sometimes in a day) is quite something, really. Although in recent years wet autumns seem to blend into wet and mild winters and they in turn blend into earlier springs and cloudier and more disappointing summers.
One thing is becoming clear – we are getting much wetter and generally milder winters and there is an increasing challenge of how to safely disperse all that excess water. We have already seen damaging flooding in areas close to rivers, perhaps not on the scale of the tragic and sudden floods that hit Valencia in October, but so much of our housing has been built very close to waterways and in flood plains, and getting rid of that water before it overwhelms residents and businesses has become one of the biggest challenges of our era.
There have already been significant failures to disperse excess water or protect river banks from bursting, as we have seen on the news. Images of people slopping out their ground floors, sweeping mud and debris away and waiting for the insurers to come and inspect seem to be on the increase. There
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are stories of people who’ve been flooded out, rebuilt, been okay for a year or so, and then been flooded out again. Even farmers are now struggling with previously productive land becoming flooded in winter and ruining crops. All of this begs the question: are we making any progress at all on getting water away safely in areas where it is now causing issues or do more fundamental things need to be done?
Where water comes from So, where does all that water come from?
If we go back to science basics, water comes out of the sky, falls onto the ground, evaporates back up to form clouds, and then it falls again as rain. More warmth means more evaporation and, supposedly, more rain clouds. This is what we are being told about generally rising global temperatures, so we have to expect more rain in future.
It often feels as though we have endless rain the UK but in areas such as London, less rain apparently currently falls than in Dallas, Rome or even Sydney – that information comes courtesy of Thames Water. With our increasing population,
| March 2025 |
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the challenge is how to use it more sparingly in future. For areas such as London, 80 per cent of water comes from rivers and 20 per cent from underground aquifers. The average person in the UK uses 142 litres of water per day (143 litres per day in London) and the Government would like to get this down to 130 litres or less. You could waste 12 of those litres by just leaving the water running while you brush your teeth!
They say 71 per cent of our planet is covered by water, with the oceans holding up to 96.5 per cent of it. This water is either freshwater, saltwater or frozen water. But amazingly, 97 per cent is actually saltwater so only 3 per cent is freshwater – and of that, 2 per cent is frozen (currently), so that leaves just 1 per cent effectively as ‘usable’ water (I am of course not including desalinated water here, the mainstay of islands such as the Maldives).
The Pacific is the largest ocean on earth and holds half of the total water. The Atlantic is second with around 20 per cent of the world’s water. The world’s largest lake is the Caspian and the world’s largest river is the Amazon. All
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