Water

Who knows why, but I’ve long been fascinated with cold places. I’ve lived in some places where the weather gets very cold, but never in a place that is continuously cold for long periods of time or where the sunlight is so low that winter darkness becomes oppressive. But I’ve read a lot about the people who have endured in the north country and about explorers who have spent time at the South pole. I’d love to visit some of those places and may one day do so. At the same time, I feel lucky to live in the place that I do. It will get chilly here, but we don’t have to endure the very cold temperatures that have been the part of some of the places I live. Three or four days of -30f can make survival seem like a bit of a struggle. You have to cover up your face just to go outside for a few minutes. Metal is more brittle in super cold temperatures and you have to be careful because things break more easily.

For example, take Yellowknife, the capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is on the north shore of Great Slave Lake. It is a great place to go to watch the Northern Lights. It is home to Buffalo Airways, an airplane operator that hauls freight to remote locations using World War II era piston airplanes. They also operate a scheduled passenger run between Yellowknife and Hay River on the other side of the lake. It is one of the few places where you can get a ride on the rumbling old airplanes. And it is a place where it gets cold. It’s fairly warm in Yellowknife this morning, only -6f. There is plenty of cloud cover and it is snowing. That’s the thing about the north country. When it is cloudy, it is warmer. The clouds insulate the ground and help keep things warm. When the air gets clear and it is bright and sunny, it will also be cold in the winter. It is forecast to clear up in Yellowknife and be -30f tomorrow morning.

At -30f, there is an entertaining activity that has been the focus of a lot of YouTube videos. What you do is to boil some water and then take it outside while it is still very, very hot and throw it into the air. You’ll get instant snow. The water droplets will freeze and there will be a flurry of snow. It only works when it is cold than -25f and when the water is boiling hot. It is entertaining, but it is also a demonstration of one of the very strange properties of water. Very hot water freezes more quickly than cold water. If you take cold water outside at the same time, the water droplets will remain liquid as they fall to the ground. I’m no chemist and I’m not up on physics, but here is my layperson’s explanation of the phenomenon: The water is close to vapor at boiling temperature. The liquid is ready to become gas. When the water is thrown into the air, the hot molecules separate from one another because they are nearly vapor already. Separated, they quickly cool and freeze. Cold water, on the other hand, forms droplets of liquid that stick together and take longer to freeze because they have more surface area.

Water is a very strange substance. It is made of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen. It would appear that at the temperatures and pressures of the earth the two, when combined, would continue to be lighter than air, but they are not. Instead, the combination forms a liquid. And that liquid has some other strange chemical properties. For example water expands when it freezes. You would think that cooling a substance would make it contract. That’s the way it works for other things. Water, however, expands and so ice floats. Instead of the warmest part being on top, the coldest part rises to the top. It is almost as if it is defying the rules of physics. All around the hills there are lakes with a layer of ice on the top that insulates warmer water below that is teeming with life that would not be able to survive if it were trapped in ice. If the lakes froze from the bottom up, the fish could not survive. As it is, the ice layer protects the life below from super cold temperatures.

Water is very stable. It maintains its chemical integrity through all kinds of transformations. The water on our planet - all of it - including the water that makes up most of our bodies has been in its present form for as long as there has been water on our planet. the same molecules that are inside of us right now have been inside of other life forms. The same water was inside of dinosaurs and bacteria and ancient animals. It has been in the polar ice caps and then recycled as snow and rain. It has fallen on tropical rainforests and flowed down ancient rivers. All of the water on our planet is being constantly recycled and used again and again.

Water is the thing that makes life possible, but our planet wasn’t always wet. When it was first formed there was no water. All of he water that is currently on Earth came from outside of the planet. It came on asteroids and comets that traveled from the outside edges of our solar system. They were bits and pieces of the universe that didn’t form into planets but traveled independently. From time to time one of these bodies would strike a planet or other object and water was transported to that object. Over the millennia, the earth collected enough water to cover most of its surface. Oceans and lakes and rivers and ice caps all formed. Water isn’t rare in the universe. There is water on other planets. It has been discovered on Mars and even on the moon. But the quantity of water on the earth makes our planet a unique object, at least in our solar system. And the water gives us life.

Without it we wouldn’t exist. Without it we wouldn’t have formed human brains to look at, recognize and marvel at the wonder that is water. Hot or cold it is a miracle.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!