ROSLYN WATER DISTRICT: WHAT IS WATER?
PART I: H AND O, OUR SMALLEST SERVANTS
Despite our familiarity with water, it is a mystery of creation. Its elements of hydrogen and oxygen should be totally incompatible. Separately they are highly flammable and even explosive. Both are colorless, odorless and tasteless. Surprisingly, when used separately as gas and ignited by a welder these elements can melt steel. Yet as water, these two elements combine to provide the very basics for life itself.
The water molecular portrait looks like a clock with the face representing oxygen. Perched at exactly 104.5 degrees from center sits one molecule of hydrogen and at the other side, another hydrogen molecule.
Oxygen is the most abundant element. It is present in almost 50% of the earth's crust and 21% of air. Hydrogen is always in combination with an almost unlimited number of compounds. Yet, in the oddest of the relationships with each other, these two elements when joined, make up the familiar substance we know as water. Contrary to most things, water expands when frozen and then is capable of splitting steel pipes.
Water itself is equally strange. No matter what form, or temperature as a liquid or even ice, it is never at rest but seeks to leave its form to escape into a vapor. It's a cloud, a fog, and dew. It leaves our body with each and every breath.
Water is a universal solvent capable of wearing away stones and anything that may be in its path. Perfectly neutral, it can jump to acid or base when coaxed with another substance giving endlessly novel compositions of matter. Polluted water can leave its sullied state as a vapor only to be returned as rain, forgiving of human assaults, yet still willing to slake our thirst and cater to our infinite needs.
Water monitors our planetary temperature interceding as clouds, rain and ocean currents to regulate our climate. Its clouds parcel out moisture from one part of the globe to another, making its appointed rounds in seasons favoring tropics and great river basins.
Water obeys the call of the heavens. Tides rise and fall to a cosmic cue exactly for time and tide and place. The sun and the moon alignment immutably govern this ancient rendezvous. Many creatures depend on this for their life cycles. At birth we issue out of water. Every living creature carries its own cache of water.
Help Our Smallest Servants Help You
◦ Conserve Water!
◦ Limit the use of pesticides and herbicides.
◦ Dispose of hazardous household chemicals at authorized sites.
PART II: OUR SMALLEST SERVANTS
Although water is common to all life, it was never understood for almost all of recorded history. The ancients classified elements as earth, fire, air and water. Aristotle opined that, "fire is hot and dry, whereas air is hot and moist and water is cold and moist while Earth is cold and dry".
This opinion remained until relatively modern times when electricity became a tool of science that a chance test of an Englishman, Henry Cavendish in 1783 passed an electric current through a sealed tube of water which "disappeared" when the current was turned on causing hydrogen to separate from oxygen as gases as water disappeared. Thinking that he had a leaky glass container, he repeated the test with the same results. The Cavendish experiment is called hydrolysis. Later, Lavoisier named one of the gases "hydrogen" meaning water maker and the other "oxygen". Thus, "H" and "O" entered our lexicon of science.
Everything about water is unique in the way of elements in natural states. Water even defies the usually strict law of physics that at low or freezing temperatures, all substances become denser, but not water. At freezing, instead of following the rules, water expands and takes a crystalline structure that breaks pipes, cracks concrete, etc. Instead of more density, it takes on a less dense crystalline form that floats on water as ice.
All this led to new thinking about elements. If water never existed we would have to invent this wondrous compound.
Water will continue to surprise us, there are new marvels ahead from it. The hydrogen content may well be the fuel of our future as in "Fuel Cells", a new modality using hydrogen to power our cars with an exhaust of just water. Prototypes of automobiles fueled by hydrogen already exist.
PART III: OUR SMALLEST SERVANTS
There are three states of most matter, gaseous, liquid and solid. Many solids are crystalline. The latter are materials with an orderly atomic arrangement, so much so that the color, shape and design can readily identify the material of the solid.
But water is the rare substance that can exist at times very naturally in any one of four states: vapor (steam, dew) liquid, solid (as ice) and as almost endless crystal designs with an incredible flair for flowering shapes.
It all starts as a vapor in the clouds. At the beck-and-call of temperature of 32 degrees F, or lower, molecules of water from each wisp of vapor form into infinite crystal designs of stars, hexagons, hollow columns, dendrites, needles and other shapes. These are all as colorless as clear water and are not yet snow until descent when these crystals attach themselves to one-another-and another and another getting bigger and bigger on the way down. They soon take a new whiteness disguised only because of the way light reflects on the millions of colorless crystals clustered together now seen as snowflakes covering the ground; as a downey white blanket.
PART IV: OUR SMALLEST SERVANTS
Previous H&O columns describe the many guises of water; its elemental structure, how it changes in form, how it is affected by lunar motion, how our climate is modified and other unusual properties. Another phenomenon about water is its artistry.
Free of palette and paint with just natural sunbeams and purely colorless specks of water suspended in air after a rain, the rainbow melds all into a perfectly formed arc of red, orange, yellow, green, indigo and violet placed orderly within the arc.
Actually the rainbow arc is really a perfect circle. We see just the top of it because the horizon cuts the other half of the circle from our line of sight. (But it is possible to see a full circle rainbow called a 'glory' from an airplane with the sun behind the aircraft).
Sunlight is a mixture of many different wavelengths of light. When passed through a prism, the light is bent and different wavelengths form into a band of colors. In much the same way, sunlight passing through the tiny droplets of pure colorless water measuring a tiny diameter of 1/50 to 1/25 of an inch, the droplets act as a prism to separate the color wavelengths of the sun into the colors we see.
When watering a flower bed with hose nozzle set to 'fine-spray,' try to back up on sunbeams. You may spy a short but real rainbow.
- A. Jack Russo