Subject
3 entries
Water
Bookmarks
It Takes 275 Water Molecules to Make Ice
Scientific American podcast item: researchers determined that a cluster of exactly 275 water molecules is the minimum required to form an ice-like crystalline structure — a finding that probes the boundary between bulk and nanoscale physics in water.
All of Earth's Water as a Single Sphere
The USGS created a visualization showing all of Earth's water as a single sphere — it's surprisingly small, only about 860 miles in diameter relative to Earth's 7,900-mile diameter. A powerful intuition-corrector for how scarce liquid freshwater actually is.
Ice Polymorphs
John Carlos Baez's Azimuth post on the extraordinary diversity of ice crystal structures — at least 15 distinct phases of solid water exist under different pressure and temperature conditions. The ice-nine trope from Vonnegut has a real crystallographic basis.