Question:
Frozen Water?!?!?!?
AH SHIIII...
2007-07-20 20:05:03 UTC
Why is it exactly that when i have two frozen bottles of water (say 80% frozen) and i open one i drink some of the water out them let them both sit in the same enviroment that the unopened bottle completely thaws before the one which had the water drunk from it?
Eleven answers:
anonymous
2007-07-20 20:10:54 UTC
This doesn't happen...you might be mistaken. Look again.
telsaar
2007-07-21 03:15:19 UTC
Exactly. If you have an almost frozen bottle of water. I'm assuming the bottle was completely frozen and had thawed somewhat. The thawing was basically in contact with the plastic part of the bottle. A solid ice core remains frozen. Then you chose one bottle and drank removing the water from around the ice and replaced it with an insulating material (air). Since the air layer between the ice and plastic and relatively thin, there is little convection and heat transfer is minimized. But for the bottle which you did not drink from it has a layer of water and is a better heat conductive material and there is the potential for a significant amount of convection heat transfer. So the bottle with all its water thaws completely first.
Nuclearchief
2007-07-21 03:25:19 UTC
Since you drank the water out of the bottle you have only ice in the bottle. While both bottles have the same amount of energy put into them to make the ice, you have taken away the water which deletes the heat transfer via convection from the water to the ice. Since there is no direct heat transfer except by radiation the bottle with the solid block of ice will heat up slower. Convection is a much better method of heat transfer than radiation. Since 1/5th of your bottle has more thermal energy than the rest and it conducts that energy to the lower temperature via direct contact and it will melt faster. The ice is only heated by the surrounding air and with a closed bottle the air in the bottle will be very close to the ice temp. Hope that answers your question.
njf13
2007-07-21 03:30:31 UTC
Liquid water conducts heat from the outside of the bottle to the ice inside better than air can.



In the bottle you drank out of, you have a block of ice surrounded by air, in the unopened bottle, you have a block of ice surrounded by water.



If you had a third bottle, with ice in it, and the air was drawn out with a vacuum pump and the bottle was capped off, you'd see the ice in the evacuated bottle would stay frozen longer than the bottle with air in it.



This is how a thermos works. The walls of a good thermos have the air pumped out to reduce the transfer of heat through the walls. Cold things in a thermos stay cold, and hot things stay hot, because energy can't move as easily through the vacuum in the walls of a thermos.



You can visualize this at the atomic level by thinking about the density of a liquid as compared to the density of air.



Heat is energy stored in vibrating molecules. Solids are denser than liquids, and liquids are denser than air. That means solids have more molecules packed into a volume of space than liquids, and liquids have more molecules in a given volume of space than gases.



When molecules collide, they transfer energy, if the material is dense, you have more molecules moving around near each other in a given region of space, so there are more collisions between molecules occuring in a given span of time, and energy dissapates throughout the group of molecules that make up the material faster than if the material were not dense.



The liquid water is denser than the air, has more molecules per unit volume, and thus will have more molecular collisions, and energy transfer will go faster through the liquid.
Jackal115
2007-07-21 03:08:19 UTC
Because the water from the unopened one is higher temp then the ice so it melts... With the opened one you took away more "high temp substance" to melt it
Midnite_rose
2007-07-21 03:15:22 UTC
Water help ice dissolve quicker, when you drank water for the open bottle you took away the water that help dissolve the ice.
Aquaboy
2007-07-21 03:10:02 UTC
I agree, and also, when you picked up the bottle to drink from it, you transferred more heat to the bottle, thus melting more ice. By increasing the energy you melt more ice in the bottle you just opened.
anonymous
2007-07-21 03:08:08 UTC
the opened bottle gives up its temperature to the warmer atmosphere. the closed bottles does but the air cannot escape and thus remains cooler longer.
anonymous
2007-07-21 03:08:49 UTC
Weird..
Mike R
2007-07-21 03:09:10 UTC
I think the only explanation is, that you're in the TWILIGHT ZONE......(theme music plays now).
Hasan
2007-07-21 03:07:01 UTC
no idea... strange man


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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