Meet a Water Molecule

i, I'm a water molecule. I love to travel and I particularly like to get things wet! We water molecules have a big oxygen atom (sort of like a head) and two hydrogen atoms sticking out (sort of like ears). There are lots of other water molecules just like me on Earth - collected in lakes and oceans, in the atmosphere, even in outer space. (Some of us ride about in comets and slam into planets for kicks.)

We like to hang out together in clumps because we are charged--one end is rather negative and the other end more positive. My positive end (my hydrogen atoms) tends to attach itself to the negative end of another water molecule or another charged object. This attraction is called a bond, a hydrogen bond.

We move a great deal, most of the time. Sometimes we float around in the air having just a gas of a time. Sometimes we bond onto each other tightly and become rigid and cold - that's when we're ice. But most of the time we just go with the flow as a liquid!

Now let's play the game:

Imagine that Julius Caesar was drinking a cup of water, and that some of those molecules of water, over the next 2000 or so years, found there way into YOUR cup.

Each cards below has a story to tell about a time in the life of a water molecule. Choose ten cards and put them in order to tell a story of how the molecules got from Caesar's cup into yours. Add three to five new cards to your story line, but these need to be those you invent yourself! Then post your additions on the GL web site.

Be sure to include ALL THREE states of mater: solid, liquid, gas.

Water Molecule Game Cards

1. I had such a mountain adventure. First I condensed on a particle above the mountains, with lots of other water molecules floating in the air. I helped make a particularly attractive lens-shaped cloud (if I do say so).

2. I poured down in a monsoon with every cousin water molecule in the book. I think we overdid it! Cows and houses were floating everywhere.

3. Summer madness! We were having a picnic on a riverbank when a group of us were swept into a river. Hundreds of clung on to a clay particle until others jostled us and took our places.

4. I was sprayed out of a nozzle onto a red rose and taken into a petal cell. It was my destiny to grow an award-winning rose.

5. I've been idling here, thousands of feet down under the ocean waters, for many years. It has been both cold and slow moving. Above my head, other molecules are dancing about in the spray and waves. Well, they can have it. This is where the real action is, the real temperature regulator for the planet, and where life began.

6. Fabulous! Rode the perfect wave. My surfing practice finally paid off, but just at the peak of the wave I was pulled off into the spray. You won't believe what happened next. The other water molecules let go of me and I was vaporized, turned right into a gas floating in the air. The salt I was holding onto was splashed up, too, and will become the seed for a rain droplet. What a whirl! I hope I can return soon for another try at the "perfect wave."

7. What a gas! Millions of us molecules are floating around in the air, just waiting to become a raindrop. But we need particles to condense around. So has anyone seen any sulfur dioxide? It's so good for making raindrops! Any good volcanic ash lately? That's good, too. Any sea salt?

8. It is cold up here in the troposphere. There are millions of us just waiting to get together. But because of the cold, we move very slowly. When one of us lands on a speck of dust, others come up and fit into an ordered, solid structure the humans call a "snowflake."

9. Here I am, stuck in a blue glacier on top of a mountain. Millions of us are held together with tight hydrogen bonds to make ice crystals. Well, it's not like the good old days when we could have a real party and cover half a continent with ice. Worse, I hear the glacier's melting very quickly, that's to humans, so I am getting ready to fall into the ocean soon.

10. Became part of a large anvil-shaped cloud. It was pretty menacing and I had to give up much of my heat energy in the process. Who needs it anyway when you could be around friends in a downpour?

11. A bunch of us rained lightly down on a pair of lovers in Paris in the springtime. Quelle joie!

12. Ayyeee! Slid under some humans in a place they call "Water Fun Park."Had to do it over and over again until I finally got lucky and evaporated.

13. I assisted in a landslide. What a ride down into the bay! Joined others saturating the hillsides, sticking to all the mud particles, and all of a sudden, we were off!

14. I landed on a highway and took up with some car oil. You could say we got along like oil and water.

15. It was a relief when we slid off the road into a runoff ditch. The town had installed an oil-water separator, so the oil went one way, while my pals and I got to go off into the stream.

16. There I was going down a fourth-order stream with a bunch of my pals just minding my business when, sloop, we were shunted off into a narrow channel called an irrigation ditch. Really, they should ask!

17. I was sucked up a plant stem while clinging to a load of nitrates! The plant tried to thank me but I told it that it came naturally. No thanks necessary.

18. I transpired from the leaf of a plant. Fabulous experience. Broke free, and soared right into the atmosphere.

19. Several of us made a bead of moisture on the shoulder of a woman carrying fuel wood for her family. Then we evaporated.

20. I am at the bottom of a glacier. You have no idea what it feels like having a several-mile-high pile of ice on my back. At least at the bottom it gets a bit warm and I get to move around more with the other water molecules at the bottom.