how come the ground under lakes and rivers don’t drink up all the water but plain surface ground drinks up everything eventually?
In: 214
It does. Want proof? Go about 20 feet from the shore and dig down. You will hit water at the same level as the nearby lake. Lakes aren’t usually where water sits on top because it doesn’t sink in, it is where water has sunk in for so long, it is filled up with water. No room for more. The lake is the overflow. It would sink in if it could, and it sort of does. Have to push the water already there to somewhere else first, or at the same time, is all. All open space down there is filled with water.
Really only a question of how far down you have to go to hit the water table, the depth where all open space is filled with water. Lakes and rivers are where the water table rises above the ground.
Until that deep (about 12 km deep) borehole was made in Russia a few decades ago, people argued about how deep water actually existed in the rock. Well, turns out there is room for water as deep as we can go. Maybe not a lot of space for it, but it is there just the same. All the way from down there until up here at the surface. Just at some point down there it is as vapor, as gas (no longer liquid), because it is very hot.
Latest Answers