So, we were sitting in a cozy, dimly lit bar recently, contemplating life’s most profound questions while sipping on a meticulously crafted whiskey on the rocks. The clinking of the ice cubes in harmony with the smooth jazz melodies that were wafting through the air created a symphony of indulgence. In that moment of liquid contemplation, a curious but seemingly obvious thought snuck into our mind – “water”.
It got us to wondering, what if water, that humble H20, were the star of the show instead? That’s right, water – that every day, unassuming, yet utterly essential molecule. When you think about it, water, the unsung hero of hydration and aquatic adventures, deserves a standing ovation for its liquid antics. We figured that now would be as good a time as any to pay homage to this under-lauded champion, the substance that quenches our thirst, fills our oceans, and makes life on Earth possible.
So, let’s raise our imaginary glasses, or perhaps real ones filled with water, and dive headfirst into today’s blog post that will explore some of the stranger and crazier facts and statistics about the wonderful world of water – minus the hangover. After all, who needs whiskey when you can have a glass of good old dihydrogen monoxide - preferably without the rocks - to toast to the elixir of life itself?
The accepted average volume of a drop of water is exactly 0.05ml (20 drops per milliliter).
And it turns out that there are over 1.5 sextillion molecules in a drop of water and more than 5 sextillion atoms per droplet. What’s a sextillion you ask? No, it’s not an 18th century French sex dance craze.
It’s a cardinal number represented by 1 followed by 21 zeros. In other words, it’s a lot!
A newborn baby is 78% water.
Adults are 55-60% water. Water is a big part of the blood that brings nutrients to all our cells. We use it to get rid of wastes. It helps us regulate our body temperature. It acts as a shock absorber for our brain and spinal cord. Our brains are 75% water; our lungs are nearly 90% water; and our blood is about 82% water.
Most of the water we consume every day comes from eating food. For example, 95% of a tomato is water, apples have 85% water content, spinach 91%, and potato’s 80%.
You’ve undoubtedly asked yourself, time and again, what do jellyfish and cucumbers have in common?
They’re both 95% water. So, this jellyfish and cucumber salad could, theoretically, almost be consumed from a glass.
In a gallon of average ocean water, there is about 1 cup of salt. But it varies. The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, for instance. Most of the salt in the ocean is the same kind of salt we put on our food: sodium chloride. The saltiest water in the world is found in Antarctica in a small lake named Don Juan Pond.
It’s filled with dense, syrupy brine rich in calcium chloride that can remain liquid to minus 50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees F) far below the freezing point of water.
And there can be a lot going on in a single drop of ocean water. It will most likely have millions (yes, millions!) of bacteria and viruses. And it could also have fish eggs, baby crabs, plankton, or even small worms.
And speaking of active drops of water, over eight million people live in New York City, and you have to assume most of them are making use of the city’s water supply each and every day. There’s a good chance that not all of them are aware their water has tiny crustaceans living in it.
The little critters are a kind of shrimp known as copepods and they are microscopic. People have been drinking them for years with no knowledge of that fact. Someone on Reddit posted a photo of one in 2010 and caused a minor uproar, but that wasn’t the first time. In 2004 the same thing happened with people fearful that the little crustaceans would not be kosher for the city’s Orthodox Jewish population. The city was not willing to filter them out because of the benefits of keeping them and recommended those who didn’t want them to filter the water on their own.
The crustaceans aren’t there for no reason though; the city keeps them there on purpose. It’s their job to eat the larvae of mosquitoes.
We all know about the concept of water evaporating, condensing, precipitating and so on. But what about the life cycle of one single, specific molecule of water? How does that water’s life play out?
A drop of water can spend about 9 days in the atmosphere before it comes back down to earth again. But once back on earth it may not move again for a long time. That one specific drop could end up in the ocean and remain there for another 3,000 years before it evaporates again! And while that seems like a long time, it’s the blink of an eye compared to water that ends up in a place like the Antarctic ice shelf. If water freezes there, it’s going to stay put for about 900,000 years.
And speaking of old, a 2.6-billion-year-old pocket of water was discovered in a mine, 2 miles below the earth’s surface near the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada. This is the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multicellular life.
The earth is a closed system that rarely loses or gains extra matter. Essentially, this means that the same water that existed on earth millions of years ago is still present today. This means that we’re drinking the very same water that the dinosaurs drank – and expelled – millions of times over millions of years ago.
Any time you look up and see a cloud you’re seeing water in the sky. But how much is up there? There are actual atmospheric rivers that move almost unbelievable quantities of water across the planet, all in the skies above.
The name atmospheric river refers to the paths of moisture that can take water from tropical regions towards either of the poles and greatly affect weather patterns along the way. The water evaporates at the equator and then it circulates away in the atmosphere, almost dragging more water behind it in a narrow but high-volume band.
While we can look at rivers like the Amazon and the Mississippi and think they are high volume, they have nothing on atmospheric rivers which can carry seven to 15 times as much water as the average daily discharge of the Mississippi. Some have been shown to move up to 6,870,000,000,000 gallons of water per day.
Here's a few quick factoids about water that you can throw around, like ice cubes, at your next cocktail party…
· Frozen water is 9% lighter than liquid water, which explains why ice floats.
· Less than 1% of the water supply on earth can be used as drinking water.
· It takes 20 gallons of water to create one pint of beer.
· 300 tons of water are required to manufacture 1 ton of steel.
· A trillion tons of water is evaporated every day by the sun.
· It takes seven and a half years for the average American household to use the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in one second (750,000 gallons).
Finally, did you know that water reacts to words and music? Well, experiments done by Japanese scientist and healer, Masaru Emoto, discovered how sounds affect water’s structure. Water can absorb and store sound effects. Using a powerful electron microscope, Emoto showed how much frozen water’s structure depends on the sounds absorbed. These experiments showed that water listens to music, as it reproduces the emotional structure of words and the shape and emotional structure of images.
And it appears everyone and everything is a critic, because Emoto claims that while positive words and classical music directed at water produce beautiful crystals with clear snowflake-like patterns, negative words and music such as heavy metal, death core, black metal, etc. create water spoils and produce ugly, chaotic, incomplete, and fragmentary crystals.
And now we find ourselves back to the beginning of our journey with a whiskey on the rocks in hand, returning to the simple yet profound essence of water. A liquid that often goes unnoticed, but it’s the very elixir that sustains us. It’s the quiet hero that quenches our thirst, fills our oceans, makes life on Earth possible, and perhaps most importantly of all, by adding just a splash to a glass of whiskey it boosts the concentration of flavour compounds at the surface of the drink, bringing more of those rich aromatics to the nose as we sip.
Yes, the wonderful world of water is boundless. So, as we conclude our exploration of this precious liquid, let’s raise a glass once more, not just in appreciation of a whiskey on the rocks but also in celebration of the remarkable and ever-fascinating wonderful world of water.
Okay this was a cool posting! Being a non-science person, I loved it, with the exception of the bacteria in the water in NYC I know it’s supposedly helpful, but disturbing. It falls under the category of “ignorance is bliss”.
That said very interesting facts that I either never learned, forgot or wasn’t paying attention. I passed 2 years of chemistry because I understood the math, but never ever really understood the concepts of molecules and neutrons etc. it was as clear as Mississippi mud or the concept of how a 30 ton steel tube can fly in the air and not fall to earth. Never made sense to me, but I digress!
That was fun, except the dihydrogen monoxide.…