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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

My Incredible Journey as a Water Droplet - Project WET

I was fortunate enough to participate in a Project WET workshop for educators yesterday at Carolina Beach State Park. One of the many activities and exercises we practiced was The Incredible Journey, where each participant becomes a water droplet and takes a journey through the water cycle.  Unlike other cycles in nature, the water cycle is not a simple sequential circuit.  Water droplets take all sorts of journeys.  This exercise helps participants grasp the complexity of the cycle by becoming water droplets.  The game is a series of stations (soil, lake, river, ground water, glacier, ocean, animal, & plant).  Each station has a bowl of colored beads unique to that station and a large die with other stations and the word "Stay" on its sides.  Participants select a station from which to start, collect a bead, placing it on a string and they roll the die to find out if they stay or move to a new station.  Participants move from station to station based on their rolls collecting beads from the station for each turn they are at that station.  After a dozen or more turns, participants are asked to tell the story of their journey from the point of view of the droplet. Here is my story.

Hi! My name is Diego, Diego Droplet. I just completed the most incredible journey.  It all started in a beautiful lake.  There I was just hanging out in the water column when I found myself being sucked down through a small crack in the lake bed and the next thing I knew I was hanging out with a bunch of my fellow droplets in a bunch of sand and gravel.  Once I got there I did move much and hung out for a long time until a bunch of new droplets showed up.  They told me that they had been rain in a big storm and they had just percolated down here after the storm.  Now with all of us droplets pushing and shove'n on each other around the sand, there just wasn't enough room and I got pushed back up into that beautiful lake again.  Along came a deer and to my surprise, she stuck her mouth in and swallowed me right up.  Let me tell you that was scary!  It was one strange trip through that deer, but I will save that for another time.  Well, you can probably guess what happened next.  What goes in, must come out.  That's right, I ended up in deer urine that she sprayed on soil along the bank of a river.  It didn't take long for me to get swept into the churning torrent.  I was up and down, bouncing of rocks and sunken logs for what felt like days. Then things started to change.  The water slowed and spread out.  It was about that time I bumped into these two guys Sodium and Chloride.  They said they where ions, whatever those are.  Soon there where a whole lot of these ion guys around.  I must have been in the ocean.  I drifted about for a very long time.  I spent more time there than just about any other stop on my journey.  One day while up on the surface I started getting really warm.  The sun was hot that day.  I got so hot that I evaporated.  Let me tell you that was a really trip.  In the ocean one minute and 10,000 feet up in a could the next.  The view from up there was spectacular!  I didn't want to leave, but the cloud was getting heavy with a bunch of other droplets, just like me, and as the cloud drift inland we ran into some very tall mountains, where it was cold and we all froze and fell out of the cloud as snow flakes.  I drifted down and land on a glacier, along with a bunch of my new snow buddies.  All together we deposited 50 feet of snow on the glacier that year.  Glaciers are cold, slow moving rivers of ice.  I think I was there as long as I had been in the ocean.  One summer I found myself close to the terminus of the glacier and I melted.  At last I was a droplet again.  It felt good to be liquid.  I dripped off the end of the glacier onto some rocks and down a crevice back into an underground aquifer, where like before, I hung out for a while among the sand and gravel particles.  Now don't get me wrong, sand and gravel are fine folks, but they can get pretty boring after awhile.  Luckily, I percolated up and found myself in a mountain stream pretty quickly. It was a small swift stream in a steep narrow valley.  So there I was flying down this stream when, bam! I smack into a big'ol rock and got tossed high in the air, in a cloud of spray.  In an instant, I evaporated and was once again water vapor climbing high into the sky.  It wasn't long before my fellow droplets and I found ourselves falling back down at the foot of that mountain as rain and what do you know, I landing back in that very same river.  I even ran into a few buddies that I had met high up on the mountain.  We swap the usual stories of our adventures.  I'm not sure I actually believe the one about being sucked up into some small metal lined lake with no sun.  I think that droplet bounced off a few too many rocks, if you ask me.  Well back to my journey.  It is nearly over now.  I probably should have told you that I'm currently in a muscle cell in the leg of a marmot.  This strange rodent stopped to take a drink and slurped me right up and I went through his stomach and his intestines where I was absorbed into his blood stream, which brought me here.  So, I'm not sure where my journey will take me from here, but I am sure I won't be in one place for too long.  Thanks for listening and safe travels to you my friend.  Maybe we'll see each other again one day.

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