After brainstorming some ideas around how people might get their freshwater if they don't live near a body of freshwater, Mrs. Brinza made a public post on Twitter asking people where they got their water from.  The responses were really interesting!

We were mesmerized by the amount of people that mentioned something about well water and groundwater.  We're not so familiar with this here in Chicago, right next to a REALLY BIG LAKE!  So we began thinking that this popularity around water in the ground was a real thing!  We had so many new questions about it...but Mrs. Brinza also found a video of a survivalist actually digging for water...

So if so many people use groundwater, and this survivalist found it in the middle of nowhere, is it more common than we think?  We wanted to see if maps of groundwater exist...and they do!  Here's a map that that exists of aquifers (places that store groundwater) in the US.

So for real now.  If people have NO freshwater nearby, what do they do?  A lot of us have been to parts around the country we looked at with Google Maps and didn't think twice about the fact that those places didn't have water.

So after developing some initial models, we had lots of ideas, which we summarized together below.  Between transporting water, lots of pipes underground, borrowing water from others, and more and more pipes, we set off to figure out some investigation ideas.

And the number one idea seemed to be:

*Use people as our resource!  We should talk to people who live in one of these places that don't seem to have freshwater nearby.  Mrs. Brinza will use the power of Twitter (or the phone since someone suggested calling people, too).  

Recognizing that there was so little freshwater on the Earth's surface, we decided to actually see if there were little pockets of freshwater for people to use as their drinking source.  After turning to Google Maps, we kind of came up short.  We sat in a scientist circle trying to make sense of our use of Google Maps as we looked for freshwater near various cities across the United States.  Here's what we figured out:

1.  Some places in the US have literally NO freshwater nearby...like for miles and miles.  They may be close to salt water, but we have figured out that cleaning salt water through boiling it is lengthy, expensive and doesn't produce a lot.

2.  Some places do have freshwater nearby, but the size of those bodies of water are small.  They can't possibly supply enough water for each person in the population (the average person in the US uses 90 gallons of water daily).

3.  Some of the freshwater sources near people are rivers. We're concerned that towns/cities would get their drinking water from the same place that treated water ends up.

SO WHAT DO PEOPLE DO!?!?!?!  Where do they get their freshwater from if they don't have ANY nearby?!?!?!

Since there's WAY more salt water than freshwater on the Earth, we're figuring that it has to be cleaned in order to make it drinkable!  We brainstormed some ways, and agreed if we boiled the water, we could catch the water that evaporates and a taste-tester could determine if the water had the salt removed!

We certainly got some freshwater from this process!  Our tastetasters were happy!

BUT...and there's always a but...

1.  We got such little water....like three drops from boiling the water for nearly fifteen minutes!
2. When we calculated energy costs to heat the water, our city would spend nearly $1.5 million a day!  A DAY!!!  We've got a lot of people in Chicago, and that's a lot of money to spend on this process.

We're thinking that people can't use this process to clean salt water. So what do they use as their water source?  Is there other bodies of freshwater nearby that we're excluding?  Maybe we'll turn to research and Google Maps again to help us figure out where they can be getting their freshwater from!

All this thinking about salt and freshwater got us thinking about numbers, and just how much there is...

So we turned to Google Earth and found some pretty interesting things:

1.  The Earth is mainly covered in salt water.  We can hardly see any freshwater from outer space...

2. The only freshwater we can really see is the Great Lakes.  How lucky are we that we live near them!

We turned to research to figure out salt vs. freshwater and just how must surface water there was (rivers/lakes and ice).  We did a mapping/grid activity with real volumes to figure out a lot!

Since there's so little freshwater on the surface, do people just use the ocean water to drink?  Do they clean it?  If so, how?  Is this really an option for people since there's so little freshwater on the Earth's surface?

All our figuring out about how and where our treated water flows, we began realizing that the Mississippi River connects to the Gulf of Mexico, which is salt water.  We're thinking that our water source (or where our clean water comes from) is most likely a body of freshwater, so this is puzzling to us that our freshwater might become salt water.

So we did some taste testing (fresh, salt, and fresh+saltwater) only to determine that YES, all freshwater becomes salt water.  We built a 2D model to show our thinking at the particle-level.  This was crazy to think about since we're pretty sure that most of the Earth is covered in salt water. Are we losing freshwater when it becomes salt water?!?!