Even now our bodies are preponderantly water, water in our blood, cushioning our brains, rounding out our eyes, and essential for digestion, excretion and reproduction. Water is both a starting point and a central subject for educating our visitors about earth history, biology, and the complex web of life on earth. On the eve of a new century and millennium water has become an even more significant environmental issue. The pollution of lakes, rivers and oceans is a major problem in many parts of the world. Waterborne diseases ravage areas where sanitation is primitive, and even industrial nations.
Children die from dysentery, and dehydration.
Erosion due to bad water management is depleting topsoils that are essential for food production, and water losses through vegetation changes are accelerating the advance of deserts at a rate unprecedented in all our history. Beyond the estuaries of the world's great rivers huge tongues of eroded soil extend into the sea and are visible from satellites. This is soil lost forever from the land. Fossil water, accumulated underground thousands of years ago, is being used, by burgeoning populations of humans, much faster than it is replaced. All this means that the health of our waterworld will be a key subject in the century ahead.