My little girl is 7 and just isn’t wrapping her head around this and I need to find a better way to explain this.
She is so so smart because she saw the coverage of Helene, and heard 17″ and hot confused.
I told her the water runs from the high places to the low places, but then she asked why the water doesn’t leave the low places and why is it still flooded.
I’m bad at dumbing things down.
In: Planetary Science
Science experiment time!
Grab a funnel, or if you don’t have one you can punch a hole in the bottom of a plastic cup.
Have your daughter hold it under the faucet and turn on the water. Start with just a small trickle. The water should have no problem flowing out the bottom at the same rate it’s coming in from the top, so the water level will never rise very high inside the funnel.
Now turn the faucet higher until it’s going full blast. Past a certain point, more water is coming into the large opening at the top than is flowing out the small opening at the bottom. When this happens, the level will rise and eventually it will spill over the top of the funnel.
This happens because the physical characteristics of water including incompressibility (meaning it can flow and change shape but can’t actually get smaller) and surface tension/friction (meaning it can only move so fast under the force of gravity alone) mean that there is a maximum speed at which it can move through a system. This is true even for large waterways like the French Broad River in Asheville. If water is coming into the top of the system faster than it can flow out the bottom, then it will fill all of the available space until it can find a new exit to spill out somewhere higher up. And 17 inches of rainfall is *a lot* of water being added to the system *very fast.*
Latest Answers