Distribution of Earth's Water Demonstration
The Distribution of Earth’s Water Demonstration is easy to implement in your classroom or homeschool. It requires very little preparation and a minimal materials list. This demonstration pairs wonderfully with our Distribution of Earth’s Water Unit. In any unit study, it is always a bonus if you can incorporate hands-on activities and visuals. This one is ideal since it visually shows how much salt water there is to fresh water. It also becomes glaringly obvious how little available fresh water there is. Read on to find out how you can implement this easy demo using only cups and a bottle of water!
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Material List is EASY!
You have a little bit of leeway on the materials list. I would use what you have. There are certain things you definitely need: food coloring, bottle of water (500 mL), salt, spoon, measuring cup or beaker, 5-6 transparent cups/glasses, and something that you can measure mL with. You can use a beaker or measuring cup for the larger mL units, but for the smaller units like most of the ones you will use for this demo, we used a medicine cap. You know, the ones you use for your children when they are taking ibuprofen.
Salt vs. Fresh Water
Start with the salt versus fresh water first. The water bottle contains 500 mL of water. This will represent the amount of water on Earth in its entirety. First, pour the water bottle into a measuring cup making sure to measure out 500 mL of water. Next, measure out 15 mL of water from the 500 mL. The 15 mL represents the amount of fresh water on the Earth. This leaves 485 mL of water to represent the amount of salt water on the Earth. Salt water is found in our oceans. It is pretty obvious from this first visual that salt water is far greater in quantity than fresh. We did put food coloring in our bottle before separating and added salt to the salt water too.
*Be sure to check out our other Salt vs. Water labs including the Salt Water Density Experiment, Floating Egg lab, and “Does Salt water or Fresh water freeze faster” Investigation.
Distribute Fresh Water to Sources
Next, we distributed the fresh water (all 15 mL of it) into separate cups that represented a fresh water source. We labeled the cups as followed:
- Ice/Glaciers 68.7% 10.3mL
- Groundwater 30.1% 4.5 mL
- Lakes/Rivers 1.2% .18 mL
Discussion & Application
Once you have completed the distribution of water to all of its sources, this is an effective time to lead a class discussion. Ask questions like:
- Where is most of the fresh water?
- What portion of fresh water is the easist to access?
- How can we convert salt water to drinkable water?
To learn more about Earth’s Distribution of Water, check out our free activities and printables here in our unit study.
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