A LOOK AT WATER & HOW IT MAKES ALL LIFE POSSIBLE

The Nobel Prize-winner George Wald, who was born in 1906, believed that our Universe was designed to support life. The evidence, he said, is clearly apparent in the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. "They all have unique properties that fit the job and are not shared by any element in the periodic system and LIFE everywhere has to be made of some combination of these four simple building blocks."

Of these four elements let us examine one of the most basic - WATER. Let’s take a look, and examine other molecules, that form liquids in our world. As liquids get colder, they "contract" and when they freeze from liquid form, the greater density allows the frozen liquid to sink to the bottom of that liquid. Water is the exception to this rule because as the temperature drops below 39^o F an extraordinary thing happens. It begins to expand very rapidly and expands even more as it freezes. Because it is now less dense than the water around it, the frozen water floats to the top. Every cube of frozen water since time began has floated to the top of our cold refreshing drinks.

What if ice didn’t float? Obviously, as the temperature dropped below freezing the top layer on the ponds or lakes would freeze and sink to the bottom, which of course would allow the next layer of water to quickly freeze and repeat until all the pond or lake would be frozen solid. Had this happened, life as we know it would not have gotten past that first winter.

Remember, water is the only element known to man that exists naturally in all three of these states: 1.) as we have just discussed in a "solid state" as ice, 2.) in a "liquid state" as water and 3.) in a "gaseous state" as vapor. Each of these unique properties have been critical to the development of our world, our plants, our foods, our bodies, our health, our heat, our cooling, our power, our electricity . . . . and on and on.

© JMH/RSH1998