Did you know that the water we drank today might have been used by a dinosaur millions of years ago?

That’s because water is on a never-ending cycle on Earth. It’s called the hydrologic cycle. Water moves through three forms — solid, liquid, gas — over and over again.

The water in oceans, lakes and rivers heats up when the sun shines on it. This makes the water evaporate, or turn into a vapor and rise into the air.

As the vapor rises, it cools down and becomes droplets. These form the clouds we see in the sky,

When the clouds become heavy with droplets, the water falls back to Earth. This is called precipitation, and it can look like rain, snow, or hail, depending on the temperature and the elevation. In the mountains, for example, it is colder so we are more likely to see snow than rain.

The rain falls into those oceans, lakes and rivers — or over the ground, where it runs into oceans, lakes and rivers. Some water also sinks into the ground.

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