Rain's Dirty Little Secret
Check out http://www.lynda.com/minuteearth for 10 days of free online courses. Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/minuteearth Thanks also to our Patreon patrons: - AshrafDude...
==========
Somewhere inside of every raindrop is a tiny impurity – a touch of salt, a speck of soot,a grain of clay – that’s absolutely crucial to the raindrop’s existence. In fact, withoutthese microscopic pieces of dirt, there would be no rain, because water vapor can’t condenseinto droplets on its own. Which is kind of weird, because water moleculeslike each other – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t cling to each other like this!And in the air, vaporized water molecules collide and stick together all the time – butthey also break apart all the time, thanks to bond-breaking heat energy. Only when the air cools downpast a certain point – called the dew point – does this breaking-apart slow down enoughfor little clusters of water molecules to grow into drople...
==========
Somewhere inside of every raindrop is a tiny impurity – a touch of salt, a speck of soot,a grain of clay – that’s absolutely crucial to the raindrop’s existence. In fact, withoutthese microscopic pieces of dirt, there would be no rain, because water vapor can’t condenseinto droplets on its own. Which is kind of weird, because water moleculeslike each other – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t cling to each other like this!And in the air, vaporized water molecules collide and stick together all the time – butthey also break apart all the time, thanks to bond-breaking heat energy. Only when the air cools downpast a certain point – called the dew point – does this breaking-apart slow down enoughfor little clusters of water molecules to grow into drople...
