Category: Planet Earth

The water cycle, also known as the hydrologic cycle, is the continuous process that describes the movement of water on, above, and below the Earth’s surface. It begins with evaporation, where heat from the sun transforms surface water from oceans, lakes, and rivers into water vapor. This vapor rises into the atmosphere, cools, and condenses to form clouds in a process called condensation. Precipitation follows, where water droplets in clouds combine and fall back to Earth as rain, snow, or other forms of precipitation. Some of this water infiltrates the ground, replenishing underground aquifers, while the rest flows into rivers and oceans, restarting the cycle.

The sky and the Sun appear in different colors (reddish or orange) during sunrise and sunset because of the way that light travels through the Earth’s atmosphere.

During the day, the Sun appears white because its light is composed of all the colors of the spectrum. As the Sun gets closer to the horizon during sunrise and sunset, its light has to travel through more of the Earth’s atmosphere before it reaches our eyes. This causes the shorter, bluer wavelengths of light to scatter more, leaving the longer, redder wavelengths to dominate.

Here are the top 32 largest deserts in the world. The list also includes cold deserts.