Water: an inevitable element

Thales,a Greek philosopher made an assertion that water is the origin of all things and it was one of the four basic elements that exist;earth, water,fire and air. Of all the elements that exist on earth,water is the most abundant. Water though available everywhere seems to be hardly enough for man use.

The total volume of water on the earth is about 1,360,000,000 cubic kilometers and covers nearly 71% of the earth surface. On earth surface ,96.5% of water is found in sea and ocean,1.7% found in polar ice and glaciers, 1.7% are found in groundwater and 0.001% in air as vapours. Of all the globally available water Only about 3% is freshwater. Source of freshwater are Surface water,groundwater, desalinization, frozen water. Marine water can also be recycled to make it freshwater as well. Freshwater resources consists of river and their plains, streams, lakes and wetlands. This implies nearly seven billion of world population and other forms of life have than 1% of freshwater to compete for global use. Thus,the quantities of available freshwater may though be simply small but could just be enough to meet twice or thrice the present world water demand if evenly distributed and rationally utilized.

Water problem is however more severe in my continent(Africa) where a great deal of effort and useful hours are committed to the search of fetching freshwater for household use. Despite the efforts and time put in search of water,its chagrin that most of the collected water are polluted.
Water,thou available in abundance can be a source of disease dispersal mechanism through contaminations of freshwaters, its always advisable to avoid use of poisonous chemicals for fishing which can affect water resources,utilization of agrochemicals in farm activities, effluents, and salinization can contaminate our freshwater,exhaust of old vehicle has a way of contaminating freshwater most especially rain,hence adoption of sulphur recovery techniques for fuels to minimize sulphur oxide emission should be encouraged mostly in Africa nations.