Water
by Jim McKinley, November 30, 2013

Water - the most plentiful liquid on earth. Everyday people experience it in various ways: drinking, food preparation, washing, rain and more. It's so plentiful, most of us tend to accept it as a matter of course and don't think about it or understand what it is.

Here are a few facts about water:1, 4, 6

Water is an odorless, tasteless, transparent liquid at room temperature
Water covers about 70 percent of the earth's surface in the oceans, lakes, rivers, and glaciers
Water is unique in that it is the only natural substance that is found in all three physical states – liquid, solid, and gas – at the temperatures normally found on Earth.
Ninety-seven percent of the water on the planet is in the form of salt water. Only 3 percent is fresh, and two-thirds of that is ice and much of the remainder is locked underground. A mere fraction of a percent of Earth's water supports all life on land.
Water constitutes the greater part of the fundamental substance (protoplasm) of which animal and plant bodies are made
Sap of plants and blood of animals contain large quantities of water
Water is an agent in erosion of the land
Water is less dense as ice than as a liquid at 4°C. Unlike other liquids, water expands in freezing
Water is called the "universal solvent" because it dissolves more substances than any other liquid. This means that wherever water goes, either through the ground or through our bodies, it takes along valuable minerals, and nutrients.
Water has a high specific heat index – it absorbs a lot of heat before it begins to get hot. This is why water is valuable to industries and in your car's radiator as a coolant. The high specific heat index of water also helps regulate the rate at which air changes temperature, which is why the temperature change between seasons is gradual rather than sudden, especially near the oceans.
The United States withdraws 339 billion gallons of ground and surface water a day

"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."
— Lao Tzu

Water is composed of two gases - hydrogen and oxygen.. A water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom symbolized as H₂O.

It is worth noting some of the key properties of these two gases.

Hydrogen - Huge quantities of hydrogen are used as rocket fuels, in combination with oxygen or fluor, and as a rocket propellant propelled by nuclear energy. Hydrogen can be burned in internal combustion engines. Hydrogen fuel cells are being looked into as a way to provide power and research is being conducted on hydrogen as a possible major future fuel. For instance it can be converted to and from electricity from bio-fuels, from and into natural gas and diesel fuel, theoretically with no emissions of either CO2 or toxic chemicals.2

Oxygen - Oxygen is part of a small group of gasses literally paramagnetic, and it's the most paramagnetic of all. [A]pplications of oxygen ... are: rocket propulsion; ... medical and biological life support. Oxygen is essential for all forms of life since it is a constituent of DNA and almost all other biologically important compounds. Is it even more dramatically essential, in that animals must have minute by minute supply of the gas in order to survive.3

Our atmosphere contains about 20% oxygen. Oxygen is part of the carbon-oxygen cycle.

Anomalous Properties of Water

Water has properties different from what is found with other liquids. This is just a brief summary covering a few of the more significant ones.

Frozen water (ice) also shows anomalies when compared with other solids. Although it is an apparently simple molecule (H₂O), it has a highly complex and anomalous character due to its intra-molecular hydrogen bonding. As a gas, water is one of lightest known, as a liquid it is much denser than expected and as a solid it is much lighter than expected when compared with its liquid form.

Water is most atypical as a liquid, behaving as a quite different material at low temperatures than when it is hot. It has often been stated that life depends on these anomalous properties of water. In particular, the high cohesion between molecules gives it a high freezing and melting point, such that we and our planet are bathed in liquid water. The large heat capacity, high thermal conductivity and high water content in organisms contribute to thermal regulation and prevent local temperature fluctuations thus allowing us to more easily control our body temperature. The high latent heat of evaporation gives resistance to dehydration and considerable evaporative cooling.

The freezing of rivers, lakes and oceans is from the top down, permitting survival of the bottom ecology, insulating the water from further freezing, reflecting back sunlight into space and allowing rapid thawing, and density driven thermal convection causing seasonal mixing in deeper temperate waters carrying life-providing oxygen into the depths. The large heat capacity of the oceans and seas allows them to act as heat reservoirs such that sea temperatures vary only a third as much as land temperatures and so moderate our climate.

The Water Cycle 7

The water cycle – also called the hydrologic cycle – involves three steps: water collected in an ocean or other source evaporates into the air and becomes clouds; the water then gathers together to become heavy enough to fall as rain; the rainwater eventually collects in pools of water which evaporate again. This cycle is constant – water never stops moving.

Although the processes mentioned above are the most common, there are other parts to the water cycle.

Snowmelt – snow at higher elevations melts and becomes runoff.

Sublimation – is when a solid turns directly into a gas, instead of first becoming a liquid. In the water cycle, this is seen when ice or snow is heated up enough to turn directly into water vapor.

The Chemistry of Water 8, 9, 10

Water is composed of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. Each hydrogen atom is covalently bonded to the oxygen via a shared pair of electrons. Oxygen also has two unshared pairs of electrons. Thus there are 4 pairs of electrons surrounding the oxygen atom, two pairs involved in covalent bonds with hydrogen, and two unshared pairs on the opposite side of the oxygen atom.

The water molecule is V-shaped and has more of a positive charge on one side and a negative charge on the other, giving the molecule the properties of a dipole. This is because of the way the molecules bond. The picture shows the structure of a water molecule. Oxygen has six electrons on the outer shell and wants to have eight. So it uses the electrons from the Hydrogen atoms to complete its shell. The result is a net positive charge near the hydrogen atoms and a negative charge on the other side.

Surface Tension of Water11

Water molecules want to cling to each other. At the surface, however, there are fewer water molecules to cling to since there is air above (thus, no water molecules). This results in a stronger bond between those molecules that actually do come in contact with one another, and a layer of strongly bonded water (see diagram). This surface layer (held together by surface tension) creates a considerable barrier between the atmosphere and the water. In fact, other than mercury, water has the greatest surface tension of any liquid.

Within a body of a liquid, a molecule will not experience a net force because the forces by the neighboring molecules all cancel out (diagram). However for a molecule on the surface of the liquid, there will be a net inward force since there will be no attractive force acting from above. This inward net force causes the molecules on the surface to contract and to resist being stretched or broken. Thus the surface is under tension, which is probably where the name "surface tension" came from.

Due to the surface tension, small objects will "float" on the surface of a fluid, as long as the object cannot break through and separate the top layer of water molecules. When an object is on the surface of the fluid, the surface under tension will behave like an elastic membrane.

Other forms of water12, 13, 14, 15

Heavy water, formally called deuterium oxide or ²H₂O or D₂O, is a form of water that contains a larger than normal amount of the hydrogen isotope deuterium, (also known as "heavy hydrogen") rather than the common hydrogen isotope that makes up most of the hydrogen in normal water.

Hydrogen IsotopesThe common hydrogen isotope - protium - consists of only one proton and one electron. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Tritium has one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus. Both deuterium and tritium have identical chemical properties to protium. Protium and deuterium are not radioactive. Tritium is radioactive due to the instability of the larger nuclei. When the nucleus breaks apart energy is released and radiates out from the atom.

Semiheavy water, HDO, exists whenever there is water with light hydrogen (protium, ¹H) and deuterium (D or ²H) in the mix. . In normal water, about 1 molecule in 3,200 is HDO (one hydrogen in 6,400 is D), and heavy water molecules (D₂O) only occur in a proportion of about 1 molecule in 41 million (i.e. one in 6,4002).Thus semiheavy water molecules are far more common than "pure" (homoisotopic) heavy water molecules.

Heavy-oxygen water is enriched in the heavier oxygen isotopes ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O is also commercially available, e.g. for use as a non-radioactive isotopic tracer. It is "heavy water" as it is denser than normal water, but is rarely called heavy water, since it does not contain the deuterium which gives D₂O its unusual nuclear and biological properties.

Oxygen Isotopes
Naturally occurring oxygen is composed of three stable isotopes, ¹⁶O, ¹⁷O, and ¹⁸O, with ¹⁶O being the most abundant. ¹⁶O has a nucleus consisting of 8 protons and 8 neutrons. ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O have one and two extra neutrons respectively in their nuclei.

Tritiated water - contains tritium in place of protium or deuterium.

In future articles we'll cover more esoteric properties of water, it's life-sustaining role, how it is controlled and it's role in free energy.

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