Water

[Foxbat]

Found this BBC video. Learned quite a few things from it so thought I’d share

Science journalist Alok Jha on why water is so incredibly weird

Science journalist Alok Jha on why water is so incredibly strange. Prepare to have your mind blown...

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[CupofJoe]

In which case I can recommend The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry on BBC Sounds and their The Weirdness of Water Part 1&2

 

[worldofmutes]

The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs. One of my dad’s books.

 

[Bowler1]

Excellent.

My water is T.Rex water, and explains why I'm so big and strong

 

[Harpo]

Here’s a very nice photo of the Amazon river, taken from the ISS

 

[Harpo]

Here is how Los Angeles would look if all the world’s ice melted

 

[LordOfWizards]

Here is how Los Angeles would look if all the world’s ice melted

View attachment 92703

That is quite a sea change.

 

[Harpo]

 

[Robert Zwilling]

"the many possible phases that exist as temperature and pressure are varied. Note that there is actually an ice-nine, the phase region in the upper left labeled by the Roman numeral IX, but it exists only for pressures much greater than atmospheric pressure and for temperatures less than room temperature. There are 15 known crystalline phases of water, all known as ice, and these phases are of especial interest to astronomers and astrogeologists since many of these phases presumably exist in our solar system, e.g. in Jupiter's icy moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus." The text just touches on a few aspects of the different phases of water. One interesting question is how many phases can a molecule have.

Its amazing how powerful water is. Just .04 percent of water is in Earth's atmosphere but it reshapes the Earth everyday. From gentle sandbars to raging floods. It fills the ground with plant life or takes it away if it doesn't come by often enough. On Earth there are many phases of water we never see. Groundwater is as varied as the original chart for the water on Earth. It ranges from frozen permafrost, to liquid, cold to steaming geysers, all the way to superheated water dissolving granite in magma deposits.

 

[Dave]

I knew about the unusual chemical and physical properties of water -- the high surface tension, chemical solvency, and being a liquid at a "relatively" low temperatures. You can see the effect that water has had on the surface of the Earth just looking out of the window on any journey -- the hills and valleys rounded by glaciers or cut by rivers, and beaches formed by rivers and seas.

If we are ever to discover "life as we know it" then it will be on a world with Water. Any intelligence on a world without water (Ammonia has been suggested as a solvent) is going to be extremely different.

The only thing I take issue with was near the start where he said that "every molecule of water has existed for billions of years." You can very easily break water molecules with electrolysis into Hydrogen gas and Oxygen gas, and burn Hydrogen in Air (Oxygen) to make Water again. The combustion of fossil fuels (Hydrocarbons) releases Water vapor into the atmosphere. That amount of Water released is significant in urban areas. So at the very least, he needs to stick an "almost" before that statement (although given the size of the Universe, that amount would be infinitely small so you can tell it was an astrophysicist who told him this.)