H20 Cycle
When you grow up near Newark, New Jersey, you try not to think about water a whole lot. The rain was acidic, the beaches washed up hypodermics and used condoms with regularity, and you wouldn’t eat anything that came from a river or lake. When it fell from the sky, you often had to shovel it, and when the clouds rolled in, it was usually in the form of a monotonous grey sheet that deadened the senses for days at a time. While it’s gotten a lot better since I was a kid, there’s nothing like the Pacific Northwest for changing your relationship with water.
Before getting into computers and photography, I was a natural scientist, and as a result I have a truly humble appreciation for this almost-magical substance. If it were not for the fact that the bonds the oxygen atoms in a water molecule form with hydrogen atoms in adjacent water molecules, water would not freeze into the strong, yet lighter-than-water lattice that we call ice. If those bonds were fractionally weaker, or the angles between hydrogen molecules were smaller, ice might sink, which would have long since caused all of the lakes and oceans to have frozen from the bottom up, a state which would be irreversible, since the sun’s warmth could never reach the ice at the bottom.
Those same bonds mean that water “clings” to the sides of the container it is in, which you can see as the “bubble” in a thermometer or test tube. This allows plants to draw water up from their roots to their leaves, a process which would be impossible without some kind of pumping force otherwise. This also creates the surface tension that allows water spiders to “walk” on water.
Water insulates the plant life so it can survive the winter, makes the sky blue, is the universal solvent, was the birthplace of life, changes the speed of light and otherwise is the most amazing substance in the universe. I don’t often wax metaphysical, but the improbability of water being the way it is without some kind of design process, seems, well, improbably unlikely.
The photographs in this series are taken from right here in St Johns, to Canada, California, Hawaii, Kenya, England and, yes, even New Jersey. I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Read MoreBefore getting into computers and photography, I was a natural scientist, and as a result I have a truly humble appreciation for this almost-magical substance. If it were not for the fact that the bonds the oxygen atoms in a water molecule form with hydrogen atoms in adjacent water molecules, water would not freeze into the strong, yet lighter-than-water lattice that we call ice. If those bonds were fractionally weaker, or the angles between hydrogen molecules were smaller, ice might sink, which would have long since caused all of the lakes and oceans to have frozen from the bottom up, a state which would be irreversible, since the sun’s warmth could never reach the ice at the bottom.
Those same bonds mean that water “clings” to the sides of the container it is in, which you can see as the “bubble” in a thermometer or test tube. This allows plants to draw water up from their roots to their leaves, a process which would be impossible without some kind of pumping force otherwise. This also creates the surface tension that allows water spiders to “walk” on water.
Water insulates the plant life so it can survive the winter, makes the sky blue, is the universal solvent, was the birthplace of life, changes the speed of light and otherwise is the most amazing substance in the universe. I don’t often wax metaphysical, but the improbability of water being the way it is without some kind of design process, seems, well, improbably unlikely.
The photographs in this series are taken from right here in St Johns, to Canada, California, Hawaii, Kenya, England and, yes, even New Jersey. I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed taking them.
