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Water gave the gift of existence to every living thing on earth. And yet, lately, it seems determined to destroy us. The widely anticipated Atlantic hurricane season is here, and early this morning the first storm, Alberto, made landfall in northeastern Mexico, dousing everything in its path.
And in Florida last week, it was as if heaven had turned on the faucet and simply let it go. The southern part of the state typically receives about 8 to 10 inches of rain during June. Some parts of South Florida received nearly 20 inches of rain in just 24 hours, making streets impassable, damaging homes and engulfing cars.
This type of rainfall has become more frequent and intense in recent decades. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and more of it is available because warmer temperatures at Earth’s surface allow more water to evaporate. In a warmer world, when it rains, it really rains. Experts call torrents like the Florida Current 100-year storms, even 1,000-year storms. And yet, they occur with alarming frequency across the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Heavy rainfall is a sign of how humans have fundamentally changed the way our planet functions. The first rain fell on Earth billions of years ago, covering the once molten surface with seas where life eventually emerged. Even now, as scientists search for signs of habitable worlds beyond Earth, they follow water because they know this little rock has become a haven for life. But by burning fossil fuels for about 250 years—not at all on the scale of our planet’s history—humans have turned a cosmic wonder into a weapon.
Climate change has disrupted the water cycle, speeding up each step in the ancient, endless process that circulates H2O among the oceans, atmosphere, and land. Global sea levels have risen by about 0.15 inches per year over the past decade, more than double the annual increase recorded in the 20th century, partly because ice at the Earth’s poles is melting (even faster than before). could be seen) and because water expands when heated. Too much, it threatens coastal communities, especially during rainstorms, and engulfs their beaches. One inch of sea level rise results in a loss of 8.5 feet of shoreline.
Meanwhile, storms fed by warm oceans become wetter. Even non-hurricane storms, combined with rising seas, make infrastructure vulnerable and strained. Mario Alejandro Ariza wrote in: The storm in Florida affected Miami’s already strained canal network, where “less rain, or rain that fell at a gentler rate, would have easily washed away.” The Atlantic earlier this week.
Heavy rain in Mexico is, in some ways, a blessing—the region has been dry lately. Droughts are increasing worldwide, but even when broken by rainstorms, relief comes with its own risks. Over the past few winters, record rains have saved California from a long drought, but they have also caused deadly floods.
If you zoom in on the storm clouds to see Earth for what it really is—a planet orbiting one of countless stars, a tiny blue dot in an endless universe—the way we treat precious water is a disgrace. It seems cosmic. Astronomical observations have yielded evidence of rain on other worlds, but the droplets are made of methane, iron, quartz, and even sand, not the H2O that helped create and nourish life as we know it.
When astronomers look for signatures of water farther away, in the atmospheres of planets around other suns, they not only envision the possibility of microbial life—the kinds of aliens we’re looking for in our own solar system. Intelligent beings, members of an advanced civilization that has collected stories and records of its water cycle. Journalist Cynthia Barnett wrote in the article, “Rain is not only part of our chaotic atmosphere, but also part of our chaotic selves—related in every scripture from the Bible to the Rig Veda, every human form from Cuneiform to Chopin.” . Rain: Natural and Cultural History in 2015. If water made it all happen here, why isn’t the same on another planet?
The prospect of such a discovery is what makes the detection of water vapor on some distant exoplanet so exciting, especially when that world orbits the habitable zone of its star like Earth. But the existence of some water in itself does not guarantee life. As far as astronomers can tell, the abundance of water on our planet is a very lucky exception. The other rocky planets in our neighborhood, Venus and Mars, had their own water cycles, with oceans and rain, respectively, before they boiled and froze. But the earth has been able to hold its own water, the gift that started it all.
For Michael Rawlins, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who studies the water cycle, the increase in historic flooding is almost karmic. “Societies around the world have developed because of the use of fossil fuels,” Rawlins told me. Exploiting that ancient reservoir became its own problem as the resulting carbon emissions warmed the planet. Water, even more importantly, made life here possible, and yet now, because of climate change, it too is “almost back to us.” But fossil fuels were not the prerequisite for our existence. It is water, and we act as if maintaining its balance is not a prerequisite for our future. In the past, we attributed such destructive rains and floods to divine powers, the work of unseen and angry gods. But in this age, we have to face the fact that it is we who have turned the cosmic abundance into a disaster.
By Cynthia Barnett
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