In the planet Earth life revolves around water. Science has evidenced that about 4.6 billion years ago Earth’s water supplies were formed and around 3.6 billion years ago water allowed life to begin on Earth. If there would be no water, there would be no life.
One of the truly fascinating things about water is that it’s never used up. Water is just recycled again and again through animals, plants, rivers, seas and the atmosphere up above.
Let’s have a sneak peek at this life-giving liquid & try to discover what makes it so special.
Water molecule is made of three atoms, 2 hydrogen atoms & 1 oxygen atom locked in a triangle—giving us the famous well-known chemical formula H20.
If the structure is slightly imbalanced that means water can attract & stick to many different substances.
This is why all kinds of things eventually dissolved in water and water is sometimes called a ‘universal solvent.’
Water is probably the only thing that can exist in three different forms: solid, liquid and gas. We are mostly familiar with liquid form as water is liquid under everyday conditions.
However, the other two forms solid and gas are not less familiar to us. All you have to do is to change the temperature or pressure if you want to convert water between three different states. As simple as that!
Water is a relatively dense substance that packs a lot of mass into a relatively small area. Water is much heavier than plastic and wood, which is why those things float on water.
The density of water creates pressure in the oceans. The deeper you go the more water above you generating immense pressure—making it challenging for scuba divers or submarine engineers.
The pressure is directly correlated with the depth. As for instance, if you dive down 100 meters the pressure is 10X greater than if you dive down 10 meters.
We know things expand as they get hotter and shrink when they are cool. Well, water is uniquely different from that aspect; water expands as is starts to freeze!
This amazing property of water is called anomalous expansion of water.
When a glass of water is cooled, the molecules start to move closer & lock together. At the temperature of 4⁰C water molecules are as close as they can possibly get.
If temperature drops down further the molecules rearranged into a slightly open structure which means ice is little less dense than freezing water.
This is why we see ice floats on water and this property is extremely vital for fish and other organisms living in water.
They can survive in winter in the liquid water underneath solid frozen ice.
Water has a high specific heat capacity which means it can hold more heat per pound than virtually any other substance.
It may be a nuisance when we are cooking or making a cup of tea in a kettle but it is useful to us in other ways.
For this amazing property we use water in heating systems like radiators because each liter of water that trickles through the pipes carries and delivers more heat.
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