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Artist History Only in the late seventeenth century did European scientists reach a clear understanding of the origin of water and its natural cycle. This cycle has three components: (a) the sea, and to a very small extent, vegetation (evaporation and evapotranspiration driven by solar energy); (b) the clouds (transfer, condensation, precipitation); and (c) continental surface water (springs, rivers, lakes) and groundwater which, with the exception of fossil water, run into the sea after a certain period of time. The first book on scientific hydrology in the Western world was De l'origine des fontaines (On the origin of springs), written by Pierre Perrault and published in 1674 in Paris by Pierre Le Petit. Perrault created a water balance in a basin located in the upper section of the Seine River. In 1687 the Englishman Edmond Halley calculated the evaporation rate of the Mediterranean and then compared that figure with the contributions of the rivers flowing into the sea. To measure the evapotranspiration of plants the French mathematician de la Hire built three lysimeters in 1688. Outside Europe, however, the Chinese had understood the water cycle 500 years before the birth of Christ, and in India, Kautilya, a minister of the Maurya dynasty (321-185 BC), had rain measured in pails placed in front of rural stores. In terms of public services, the first flood-warning system, set up by the Chinese in 1574 on the Yellow River, used horseback riders who travelled faster than the water. Owing nothing to the West, the Koreans started taking regular, systematic rainfall measurements in 1441 and have continued doing so ever since. The principal mystery of the water cycle was why the sea level did not rise despite the continuous inflow from the rivers. To solve this, it would have been necessary to estimate the large quantity of sea water evaporated by the heat of the sun. However, that was not possible since it was assumed that the seas covered only a limited surface area in a flat and disc-shaped world. This notion, inherited from Ptolemy (90-168 AD), faded out in the West, especially under the influence of Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642). Egypt presented another paradox for the ancient world. The Nile flooded at the height of the dry season and those living along its banks did not know where the source of the river was. That discovery was only made in the late nineteenth century by Europeans. In ancient Egypt the lower castes thought that the Nile was just a branch of the Mediterranean and believed that the sea water rose in the river, in much the same way as in a bay in Brittany. The educated classes, however, measured the floods with the first scales to be set in the bed of the river, the famous nilometers. Further questions arose from the observation that the rivers continued to flow even after the rain had stopped. What was feeding the rivers? In contrast to more plausible hypotheses, Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed the fanciful notion that river flow resulted in part from the condensation of vapour of groundwater, itself produced by the flux and desalinization of sea water in the ground.

Group Members e v i a n

Instruments water

Additional Info sorry, no additional info yet

Location Den Haag, Den Haag - Netherlands

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