Water (2)

Today is World Water Day 2011 and the theme for this year is ‘Water for Cities’. The theme for this weeks blogs posts will therefore be all about water.

Water, dihydrogen monoxide, oxy-dihydride – what ever you call it, it means the same thing – water (H₂O). Water is special to us for all sorts of reasons …

Image kindly reproduced accoding to the licence at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Liquid-water-and-ice.png

… but from the chemistry point of view I feel that the most important property of it is its unusually high freezing and boiling point when it is compared to the other group 6 dihydrides (H₂S, H₂Se, H₂Te, H₂Po).

This very property has meant that water is aable to exist as a liquid on earth when we may have expected it to freeze and turn into a solid.

Why is this important, well, it allowed life to flourish, to survive and evolve. It allowed us to come into being.

Why does water have this unusual property? I will reveal this tomorrow but if you know, please make a posting on this site 😀