Is This the Sea? <ci> <si> <ti>

Let me tell you a story. A special story. It is a story of the sky, the earth, the sea, and the sun. Together, they make a wonderful thing. The weather.

It all starts in the sky. By the motion of the wind, clouds begin to take shape. As they get bigger, they get heavier. Soon, they get too heavy to stay in the sky.

The water begins to form. Then, it drops. One by one, and then more and more, the water drops from the sky to the earth. It is now rain, and it has only one mission. Get to the sea as quickly as possible.

It does not matter what location they end up in. If they land on the earth, they roll. They roll and form together into bigger drops, and slide down hills, into gutters, and then into puddles and ponds.

The puddles and ponds all link together, the rain now a moving, rolling mass of water. It is a migration of water from high places to low places. The ponds become streams, and the streams become creeks.

The drops of rain are on quite the vacation. They have moved from the sky to the earth. Now they make their way from streams and creeks to the river.

The mission of the raindrops continues, past fields and forests as they sail down small rivers into bigger rivers. Their goal is close, and the closer they get, the faster their journey is.

Finally, after miles and miles of travel, they are at the location they were seeking all along. The river opens up into the sea, thousands of raindrops joining with millions from all over the world.

The rain has made it from the sky to the land back to water again, but there is one final leg of their journey. One last trip that involves the heat of the sun. The water gets warmer, and as the heat touches the rain, something special happens.

Evaporation! The heat of the sun causes the rain to turn into what they started out as: Clouds! They lift off from the sea and fly high, high into the sky, no longer trapped as water but free again as air.

The tiny clouds collect together and form bigger ones. Then the whole cycle starts again. It is an ancient, old cycle that has happened for millions of years. Light becomes heavy, heavy becomes light. Air becomes water, water falls to Earth, Earth leads to the sea, and the sea warms into air.

This story has a name. Precipitation. It is one of the most important stories in the world. Without it, there would be no life on our planet. The sky, the earth, the sea and the sun, together a cycle. Everything comes back to where it begins.