“OH MY GOODNESS! THAT LAKE OVER YONDER IS FROZEN! LET’S GO DRIVE THE CAR ON IT!!”
If you’re friends with someone who has ever said anything remotely close to the above sentence: unfriend them immediately. Reflect on the poor decision it was to be friends with someone who puts your life in danger. Then treat yourself to a slice of chocolate cake, because you are still alive. Thankfully.
If YOU have ever said anything remotely close to the above sentence: get life insurance and a helmet. You’re obviously recklessly impulsive.
Lakes are for swimming and fishing and boating and other aquatic things. Not for driving. They can crack and your car can go down and that’s a story I don’t feel like reading about. If only lakes could stay always in their nice watery form and all danger in driving on ice could be avoided. Except for that isn’t possible because the treacheries of winter like to get in the way. And that is because our happy little friend latent heat decided to go to the dark side and instead of melting things, he froze them. The audacity!
Unlike when we discussed latent heat melting the snow into a liquid it’s sort of working in reverse here. It is taking a liquid and turning it into a solid. Temperatures are dropping and then BOOM: the water reaches its freezing temperature. At this point there is no sensible heat acting on the water at the moment because latent heat doing his part. Latent heat takes energy out of the water and releases it into the environment. This causes the individual hydrogen bonds between the water molecules to hug closer to each other – obviously because it’s getting cold and they just want to stay warm. Subsequently the surrounding environment is given energy and warmed up a bit. There you have it… you’re lake is now frozen.
That’s right, it’s just the reverse of melting. Your science friends are still probably just looking at you with the same pity in their eyes. Seriously, just walk away.
http://www.geekosystem.com/boiling-water-freezing-video/
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