Water is arguably nature’s most magnificent creation. Not only is it the basis for all life as we know it, it also drives the global climate that makes life on the land possible and plays a crucial role in the develop-ment of our civilization; all of this because two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom connect in an unusual way.

Courtesy of the unique way in which the hydrogen atoms bond in a water molecule, water has an unusual and extremely beneficial property. When liquid water freezes, becoming solid ice, it expands. This is contrary to how most materials behave. Most materials become denser as they change state from gas to liquid to solid, the molecules becoming more closely packed together. Not so with water.

	Water's most unique and beneficial property is its ability to exist as a liquid, a solid and a gas under normal earth conditions. In the process of changing states, heat and water are moved around the planet.

When water becomes a solid, it expands and becomes less dense, causing the solid H2O to float in liquid H2O. This is such common knowledge that we seldom give it a thought. But if ice were denser than liquid water, it would sink. Not only would our drinks look strange with the ice cubes at the bottom of the glass, but most of the water on the planet would be ice. Ocean water would become ice and would immediately sink where in its dark depths the sun’s heat could not penetrate to melt it. Since the slightly denser cold water would tend to stay at the bottom, there would be no significant convection to mix the oceans. It wouldn’t take long until most of the earth’s water was frozen with only a thin layer of melt water on top.

	Using stored solar energy, the oceans power the global weather system, moving water from the oceans to the continental interiors.

That would mean a drastically different climate on earth. It is the vast and deep oceans that are responsible for earth’s weather. The oceans, mostly along the equatorial latitudes, absorb solar energy, gaining heat in the process.

This enormous heat sink then releases its stored energy slowly as water evaporates from the oceans’ surface, releasing both water vapor and heat to the atmosphere. This is one of the great benefits of water’s ability to convert from a liquid to a gas. The temperature differences between the newly released warm water vapor and the surrounding atmosphere cause convection currents, moving huge volumes of moisture-laden air. As this warm wet air rises, it displaces the air above it causing massive volumes of the atmosphere to move, creating our global weather patterns.

If not for the constant transfer of oceanic water vapor to the continental interior, most of the land surface would resemble the barren, rocky surface of the moon. We can readily see the impact of the oceanic heat sink on the global weather when it is disrupted by El Niño. The “normal” heat flow in the Pacific Ocean is shifted eastward with dramatic consequences—destructive floods in the southern U.S. and northwestern South America, and devastating droughts in Indonesia, Australia, and Central America.

When water moves inland across the continents where it falls as rain and snow. Without this added benefit from the oceanic solar collector, there might not be enough water to support land-based life. The water deposited on the land has another unexpected benefit. Under the influence of gravity, it seeks to return to the lowest point, the ocean basins. In so doing, it sculpts the landscape, eroding mountains like the Canadian Rockies and carving the Grand Canyon.

	Rushing down from the high continental interior, water sculpts the landscape and provides sustenance for life.

As the primary erosive force on the planet, water moves vast amounts of material from the highest mountaintops and deposits it at lower elevations, creating the soils in the valleys and plains that nurture plant life. These soils, which are no more than tiny grains of rock weathered and chipped off the mountains by water, seldom fit back together into a tight formation, leaving relatively large spaces between the individual grains. In one of nature’s extraordinary interconnections, these spaces get filled with water, life-giving water that plant roots can extract. Not only does water create the soil, it then uses the soil to retard its headlong rush back to the ocean.

Water also has the ability to dissolve an incredibly wide variety of materials, so many that it is often called the universal solvent. Rocks are not immune to the special chemical solvency of water—and that is a very good thing for us. Water breaks down the minerals in the rock, softening and weakening them until they can be washed away to become the soil that carpets most of the land surface. Broken down, the mineral components of the soil then become available as nutrients for plant growth.

And we’re all familiar with water’s ability to chemically alter steel and iron. Millions of dollars are spent every year to prevent water from slowly rusting our bridges and buildings. In less than ten years, automobiles show the oozing, ulcerous rust stains of water’s ability to dissolve steel. Given more time, all man’s magnificent structures can be reduced to rusty stains in the dirt.

Remember the eroded bits of rock that the water was carrying back to the sea? Well, some of it did make it back there. These tiny grains of sand, now very well rounded by their bouncing journey, are deposited on the sea floor. Above them, vast numbers of single-celled creatures, diatoms, live out their lives until their bodies float down to mix with the sand particles deposited on the seabed. Always hard at work, water keeps depositing more sand under the rain of diatomaceous bodies until the weight of the overlying sand begins to compress the underlying grains. Under this immense pressure, heat is generated, turning the sand into sandstone and diatoms into oil where man recovers it millions of years later. All of the modern inventions derived from petroleum — plastic, gasoline, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, rubber, and synthetic fabrics — are indirectly the result of water.

	Perhaps a reflection of our origins in water, a quiet reflection induces a peaceful inner reflection in our minds.

The same sedimentation process that created oil converted the detritus of the swamps — silt, sand and plant material — into coal. What would our world be like without fossil fuels? Without the energy supplied by fossil fuels, the industrial revolution might not have occurred. What would our civilization be like if the industrial revolution hadn’t occurred? In some ways our world might be better, but in some ways it might not.

Then there’s electricity. Much of the electrical power in eastern Canada and northeastern U.S. comes from one of the greatest waterfalls in the world, Niagara Falls. Without water, would we even have electri-city? We might have figured out how to produce electricity from wind, but would it be sufficient for our needs?

Water, or perhaps the memory of water, is buried deep in the human psyche. Having evolved in water, composed mostly of water, we respond on a very deep level to water in our lives and our environment. Deep in our cerebral cortex, we are water, so it is not surprising that we respond to it on a variety of emotional levels. The sounds of water can be some of the most soothing sounds we know, whether the gentle gurgle of tumbling stream or the cardiac thud and sigh of the ocean. It is a rare person indeed who is not moved by moonlight softly reflecting in tranquil water. Reflecting water possesses the utopian magic to magnify that which we find pleasing and diminishes that which disturbs us. Nor can we fail to be awestruck by the overwhelming power of a massive waterfall like Niagara Falls or intrigued by the vast expanses and alien depths of the ocean. Water can reflect our innermost thoughts, bringing a deep serenity to our troubled minds or it can evoke our deepest fears.

Water is truly the most resourceful of our natural resources — uniquely structured to provide the heat source for the global weather engine, powerful enough to carve the Grand Canyon, industrious enough to create fossil fuels, benevolent enough to support life, and abundant enough to do all of this across the entire planet. It has been shaping our planet for millions of years and will continue to do so in common and uncommon ways for millions of years to come if we have the wisdom not to interfere with this wondrous substance,