Terra Affirma: Water Eats, Earth Drinks

Thirst: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Water Eats, Earth Drinks
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Terra Affirma: Water Eats, Earth Drinks

Water has an appetite.

Why you can trust us

By Sarah Gilman

< 1 MIN READ

May 18, 2023

An illustration of clouds and rainfall that carves paths into a red and brown landscape features the following text: It is impossible to name all the ways that water finds to go underground.

On the Kaibab Plateau, on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, it’s a miracle that it does at all. A mere 30 inches of precipitation fall on the plateau’s summit per year, and 16 on its flanks, but the air is dry enough to evaporate two to four times that.

No perennial streams flow across the Kaibab’s surface. Its water comes in pulses: snowmelt in spring, the flooding pound of monsoon thunderstorms in late summer. This water quickly filters down through sinkholes, fractures, and faults, then settles into layers of sandstone and limestone left by an ancient sea.

Illustrated water cuts subterranean pathways through red, light green, and tan earth. Handwritten follows those pathways and reads: Water has an appetite, and here, it gorges, hollowing the soluble rock into corridors and caves and pits and tubes. After thousands of feet of descent and dozens of miles of lateral traverse, streams and rivers born in the dark break free and tumble from the Grand Canyon’s walls.

Once, an author friend climbed into the rushing mouth of one of the largest of these falls, hundreds of feet up a cliff. He and his companion wedged their way through tunnels and swam through wide caverns for a quarter mile until the chill turned them back. Later, he wrote that he remembered the silence of the spring’s deeper chambers most of all. It felt like the beginning of the world.

A single river of water cuts through layers of brown, tan, and red earth. Handwritten text reads: And it was, in a way: Earth meets water’s hunger with its own thirst—gulping its gaps and cracks full, carving the strata of its oldest memories into something new. Sometimes, it swallows whole rivers. In Slovenia, the Reka disappears into an intricate cave system for 24 miles before surfacing again in Italy as the Timavo. The Santa Fe does the same for three miles in Florida. The Mojave, in California, can seem more like a ghost than a river, flowing beneath its bed through the sand. That is how it is with the Methow in Washington, where I live—whole stretches moving out of sight through glacial debris during dry late summer and deepest winter, when our moisture mostly falls as snow.

Illustrated waterfalls cascade over red-brown earth, falling onto two human figures outlined in rich brown tones, with water carving botanic patterns through them. Handwritten text reads: When I catch those snowflakes in my mouth, their meltwater makes my throat a subterranean creek, feeds countless tributaries, fans through every delta in my flesh until it is as saturated as soil after a lasting storm.

I once visited the same Grand Canyon falls that my friend climbed inside. The river plunged from a sheer rock face down a series of terraces. Ferns and flowers and moss and trees crowded its banks. We stripped and stood beneath. The falls hit my shoulders like a slap: the sound of water colliding with water, through a tight drum of living skin.

Sarah Gilman is a writer and illustrator covering the environment, natural history, and science. A contributing editor at Hakai and bioGraphic magazines, her work has also appeared in High Country News, The Atlantic, and more.

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Thirst: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Water Eats, Earth Drinks

Thirst: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Water Eats, Earth Drinks

Water has an appetite.

Summer 2023

Thirst

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YES! Media Says Farewell—With Gratitude and Hope