1 Water is a colorless and odorless substance found all over Earth. Water is made up of billions of molecules. Each molecule is made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms held together by strong covalent bonds.
Water is found in three different forms on Earth - gas, solid, and liquid. The form water takes depends on the temperature. Water on our planet flows as liquid in rivers, streams, and oceans; is solid as ice at the North and South Poles; and is gas (vapor) in the atmosphere. Water is also underground and inside plants and animals. All living things need water in some form to survive on Earth. People can go weeks without food, but can live only a few days without water.
Water is an important resource with many uses including food production, cleaning, transportation, power generation, recreation, and more.
Contributor - Jennifer R. Fetter, Penn State Extension
For a world largely covered by oceans, with skies full of clouds, and a continent covered by ice, the Earth actually has very little water. By total mass (see the graphic) the Earth’s water is a little drop (fresh water is the smaller drop) next to a large rocky globe. While water is abundant in our solar system, the Earth formed in the inner solar system that had most of the water cooked out of it. Further, the large collision that formed the moon would have reheated the Earth and driven off what little water may have initially been incorporated in the proto-Earth.
The best hypothesis is that the water came from later accretion of small icy bodies after the initial formation of the major planets. The early solar system was a messy place filled with debris and small asteroidal-like objects not initially incorporated into larger bodies. In the outer solar system many of these would have been dominantly made of water-ice. They would, however interact gravitationally with Jupiter and the other gas giants, which would have deflected some of them into the inner solar system, where in turn a small fraction of them would have collided with the Earth, giving it the small amount of water that it has today.