Water Cycle

[439 words] In modern times we often want to think that science has all the answers, that they have figured everything out. Science is making great strides in our understanding of the world around us and we think we are getting to know and understand our world in ways that ancient people never could have. One of the things that you may have learned about in school as a child is the water cycle (hydrologic cycle). There is a mystery that scientist were trying to figure out for thousands of years. Where did the water in the rivers all come from, and why didn’t the ocean’s water level constantly rise? In the 1600s, two Frenchmen, Pierre Perrault and Edmé Mariotte, showed that there was enough water from evaporation and rain to explain how water reached the land and then flowed back to the sea. Finally, these scientists came up with…