Actually, to be fair, I should’ve said more than I did in the above post. No excuse beyond not realizing I’d have to register in order to respond and not leaving myself enough to do both.
But Prose, please ask someone whose scientific knowledge you trust–say, your eleventh grade chemistry teacher–and he or she will explain to you that, yes, the “O” in “H2O” cannot be removed from water without making it not-water, but that’s not the oxygen the above posters referred to as dissolved in water. That oxygen is the O2 that’s dissolved, along with many other gases and minerals, in anything but the purest distilled H2O.
Just ask yourself this question, if you doubt that there is oxygen, dissolved and accessible, in water: where does a fish get oxygen?
If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
–Russell Hoban in Turtle_Diary
lissener, thank you.
(I sure hope I spelled your name right…I need to learn to highlight and copy things BEFORE I begin to compose a post!)
As I was reading and scrolling down the posts subsequent to mine, I was piecing that very thing together in my head.
Quite true: If there is no dissolved Oxygen in water, how would aquatic animals, dependent on Oxygen for metabolism, survive? If there was no dissolved Oxygen in water, then what good is a dissolved Oxygen (DO) tests that chemists and biologists use to determine the ‘health’ of a body of water? Or why bother with a Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) test which can be used to help determine the numbers of microorganisms in the water by measuring their consumption of O2?
I also should have mentioned in my previous post, but it didn’t come to mind until the writing of this one, that, except for extreme depths, colder water can carry more dissolved water than can warm water…
Another reason that boiling water, then letting it cool, (undisturbed as to not cause any agitation which would cause some O2 to be re-dissolved) will freeze faster than water of the same temperature straight out of the tap.
Assuming all waters aren’t marine in origin, of course. For we all know that dissolved sulutes (salt) will lower the freezing point (and also raise the boiling point) of water and probably anything else.
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even checkered with defeat, than to rank with those poor souls who neither suffer much nor enjoy much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
BTW, prose, C14 isn’t the same carbon that composes diamonds or the graphite that resides in your favorite pencil. Rather C12.
C14, as any scientist can tell you, is a radioactive isotope that is used, somewhat questioningly, to ‘carbon-date’ organic materials, provided that that organic material isn’t over 50k years old.
For crying out loud. He isn’t talking about the O2 bound to H2 to make H2O. He is talking about DISSOLVED air. That’s right. Dissolved air. Gases dissolve in liquids just like salt–just not as much. Here is an experiment you can do at home. Get a clear glass. Fill it with hot water. Is the water clear–if it is like mine, it will look milky for a few seconds. That is air “breaking” out solution because the water in the water heater is under pressure, and air dissolves into the water. But the solubility of air in water in inversely proportional to the temperature. When your water comes out of the tap, the gas “breaks out”.
Now as far the hot water freezing question is concerned, cold fausset water has more air in it that hot tap water. Look at your ice cubes–you will see tiny bubbles. As water makes that transition to ice, the crystalline structure of the water molecules doesn’t allow for interspacial “dissolved” air, it has to go somewhere. This can interfere with the formation of ice crystals-SLIGHTLY. But don’t forget that while hot water is cooling, is is dissolving air from the freezer atmosphere too, but it may not become completely saturated. Hot water ice cubes should be clearer than cold water because of this. But the “time to freeze” effect is very slight.
I know when I’m wrong, thankx guys for pointing it out to me, here’s some web sites that disprove me and help the 1st guy out: http://h2osparc.wq.ncsu.edu/info/do.html
Um, thanks, Prose, for the link that offers to explain “How Fish Breath [sic],” but I didn’t ask you that question because I didn’t know the answer, but because you apparently didn’t.
If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
–Russell Hoban in Turtle_Diary
