If a pour a glass of water from my well would it be a true statement to say that it was created in the original solar nebula and there fore is about 4.5 billion years old?
In current natural processes is water created or destroyed? I read the wiki on water which stated water was created by out gassing in the formation of the sun. So I guess there are no natural current processes creating water?
I was reading a book last night and the author mentioned the water in the stream she was standing in was the oldest thing she had ever touched.
I don’t have any actual facts contribute. I just wanted to say that I’ll be watching this thread because when one of my kids picks up a bottled water, looks for the ‘Sell By’ date and then asks, " Is this old?", I say yep, sure is.
Water is constantly being taken apart into its constituent parts and re-assembled from those hydrogen and oxygen molecules. I’d wager that very little of the water we have now on earth has been unchanged since the coalescence of matter in the primordial solar system.
carbon dioxide and water vapor are the two classic products of complete combustion (as Faraday demonstrated in his classic “Chemical History of a Candle” lectures). Every time you burn a candle, or step on the gas in your car, you’re chemically creating water that wasn’t there before (although the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in those molecules were probably parts of other water molecules countless times before).
Liquid water isn’t a very stable molecule. Its hydrogen atoms exchange with the hydrogen atoms on other molecules of water on a timescale of seconds to minutes.
I had a high-school science teacher who was fond of telling us that in any glass of water there were so many molecules of water that at least one of them had had to have passed through our favorite movie star at one time. He thought this would somehow seem cool to us…
My husband told me that he recently saw a thing on one of the science channels that said we have exactly the same amount of water on the planet that we had a gagillion years ago. Wish I had a cite.
Squink is quite right about this. The protons on water are constantly exchanging. Even so, there are plenty of mechanisms by which water is created and destroyed naturally.
That’s so weird. My four year old daughter who is very curious about science asked me the same thing last night. I struggled for a good answer. I am glad this thread is here.
Complete combustion creates water vapor, so a forest fire from lightning would create water vapor. What are some other natural reactions that would create water?
Water is such a common byproduct of chemical reactions that it would almost be easier to list those that DON’T create water. Just about every biochemcial process either creates or destroys water.
Take photosynthesis:
6 C02 + 6 H20 => C6H12O6 + 6 O2.
And if that glucose is polymerized into starch or cellulose it releases a water molecule.
And digesting that glucose runs the reaction in reverse, obsorbing oxygen and creating CO2 and water.
In any chemical reaction involving carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide and water are the two lowest possible energy results.
Just about anything that burns that contains hydrogen is likely to produce some water. When things burn, they combine with oxygen. So things that contain hydrogen often produce water. LOTS of stuff contains hydrogen. That plus all the hydrogen that’s produced in plants is a pretty large source of water in the atmosphere. I imagine that it’s basically true, though, that the amount of water we have on the planet is pretty much constant, given that some is being bound up in places and other is being produced. Just a WAG, though.
Layperson’s question here. Occasionally I’ll see a drop of water on the tip of a leaf of my pothos (houseplant). Since said leaf is a couple of feet from the roots of the plant (which is, obviously, where I water it), I’ve never been clear where it came from. Is this a byproduct of photosynthesis?
The solar wind delivers about 2 kg of hydrogen per second at earth (solar H flux ~1 X 10^9 kg/s, earth subtends an angle of about 8.5 X10^-9 degrees). While the planet’s magnetic field probably prevents much of that from hitting atmosphere, you’ve got a potential flux of 6.3 X 10^16 kg of new hydrogen every billion years.