27 fascinating facts about water

Water is the part of our everyday life, and there is so much we don’t know about it. We represent 27 fascinating facts about water, and let us know in the comment section is you have already heard about some or if we missed some!

1. There is about 1.5 billion square meters of water on the Earth – that is enough water to fill 800 trillion Olympic pools!
2. If all water would be evenly distributed on the surface of the Earth, it we be 3700 m deep.
3. 97% of water on the Earth is salt water, 2.1 % is captured in the icebergs on the Earth poles. That means that less than 1% is fresh drinking water.
4. Water molecules stick to objects and to one another, which makes water sticky, and that is why the water has extremely high surface tension. And that water quality is exactly what enables us to live: that means that the water gives the blood ability to flow even through the narrowest blood vessels in the body, despite the Earth’s gravity.
5. At room temperature, water should turn to gas – all similar molecules, like hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) or ammonium (NH₃) are gasses. However, the stickiness of water prevents the water molecules to turn into gasses and keeps them liquid.
6. Water is the second most common molecule in the universe. The most common is hydrogen (H₂).
7. The biggest cloud of water vapor was discovered by NASA scientists around a black hole that is 12 billion light years away from the Earth. Inside that cloud there is 140 trillion times more water than in all the oceans on the Earth.
8. All the water on Earth came from comets and asteroids. That happened around 4.5 billion years ago.
9. Antarctica was covered with ice for more than 30 million years. Now it’s covered with tens of thousands of trillions of tones of snow and ice.
10. There is ice on Moon, Mars and Mercury poles.
11. There are at least 16 different kinds of “phases” of ice and they all have different crystal structures.
12. The Sun and other stars like the Sun every second produce the quantity of water that is 100 million times bigger that the quantity of water in the Amazon River.
13. Water constitutes about 60 or 70% percent of our bodies. This changes during life: water constitutes 95% of human fetus in the first couple of months, while on birth the quantity of water in the body is around 77%. An adult weighing 70 kilograms, has approximately 42 liters of water in their body.
14. During the year, each person drinks around 1 cubic meter of water (1000 liters).
15. Water expands when frozen, unlike other liquids. This is very significant for life – lakes and river are frozen from top to bottom, so even during the ice age, there was always water in liquid state that made the evolution of living organisms possible.
16. Hot water freezes faster than cold water. This is also known as Mpemba effect and it still hasn’t been discovered why it happens.
17. During the five-minute showering we spend about 200 liters of water.
18. For flushing the toilet we use 8 liters of water – that is how much we use to brush our teeth.
19. It takes around 200 liters of water to produce enough coffee beans for one coffee cup.
20. It takes about 15000 liters of water to make 1 kilogram of beef.
21. It takes 100 liters of water to make two slices of bread and 65 liters to make cheese spread for one sandwich.
22. It takes around 150 liters of water to make a pint glass.
23. To make a kilogram of cotton it takes 10 000 liters of water. That quantity of cotton is needed to make one T-shirt and one pair of jeans.
24. Wherever there is liquid water on Earth, there is life, even if water is in the boiling point.
25. On Saturn’s moon Enceladus, beneath the ice core of the ocean there is a hot ocean. Since hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean are places where life originated, scientists consider Enceladus a good place to start researching extraterrestrial life.
26. Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli devised a plan for winning the war by changing the course of the Arno River. Da Vinci was obsessed with water, especially with whirlpools. He based his scientific studies on water flows, and that was much before fluid fields were discovered.