Water, Water Everywhere

Reading time approximately 90 seconds


In Mrs. Irksums English class, I learned some lines from the poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Our old sailor laments, 'Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink'. He was surrounded by a salty ocean and developed not only a mighty thirst, but an appreciation for that vital liquid.

We should all have an appreciation for this remarkable compound which, due to its oddness, makes life possible on Earth.

Water is a very simple molecule made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. This simple combination allows unique chemical and physical properties without which we simply wouldn't be here.

So what makes water so different?

Well for one thing, unlike other liquids, when it freezes, it floats. If ice sank, ponds and oceans would freeze from the bottom up making most life impossible in water. Instead it stays on top forming an insulating layer keeping the water under it from freezing.

Not only that but, unlike other substances, it absorbs a huge amount of heat before it gets hot and releases that heat slowly. Water also conducts heat easily. Heat moves easily in water from hot spots to cold spots reducing extremes in temperature. These two properties allow water to move heat around moderating the Earth's temperature and letting organisms more easily control their tissue temperatures.

One really amazing property of liquid water, putting it in a class by itself, is its ability to act as a universal solvent. It can dissolve just about anything-even gold- better than anything else. It is estimated that about 20 million tons of gold are dissolved in the oceans. Only problem is that it costs more to extract it than it is worth. Darn. This ability to dissolve nearly everything, along with its ability to flow, allows water to carry and move all sorts of things around. Plants, for instance, find this useful when water dissolves nutrients from minerals in the soil and carries them to their roots.

But, as the guy on TV selling the slicer and dicer says, “That’s not all folks.” Liquid water is a great place for chemical processes to take place. It provides a physical and chemical medium which facilitates many vital processes within cells as well as supplying hydrogen for such things as photosynthesis. The oxygen we breathe is what is leftover after green plants split a water molecule to get hydrogen. The very air we breathe comes from water.

As a famous naturalist once said, “There is magic in water.”