If water boils on the stove at approximately 100 degrees celsius, then how or why does water in the ocean/seas/lakes etc evaporate when it surely doesn’t reach anywhere near this temperature?
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Water doesn’t need to reach boiling point to evaporate. Evaporation happens at any temperature above freezing and even below the freezing point. And ice can actually sublimate (go straight from solid ice to gas).
The boiling point is just when the pressure in the water reached the same as the pressure of the air pushing on the water.
It doesn’t need to reach boiling, it can actually evaporate at near freezing temperatures. It’s more about how much water is already in the air at that tempature which will determine the rate at which it is evaporating, which a boiling pot the tempature makes it obvious its evaporating. It can also evaporate directly off snow or ice which is called sublimation
Boils =/= evaporation
Water changes state from liquid to gas when it gets enoguht energy. As surface of sea is constanlyy bombarded by energy from sun, some of particles will change state.
100° degrees is temperature where you will see buubles in your vatch of water, but water will start to evaporating a lot sooner.
Molecules are bouncing around in liquid water at a certain speed. This speed can be measured as the temperature of the water. Sometimes a molecule that is not really going fast enough to be vapor bounces near the surface and flies into the atmosphere, becoming vapor anyway. That’s evaporation. If you heat the water until all the molecules are going fast enough to become vapor, that’s boiling. The bubbles in boiling water are small pockets of water molecules that had absorbed enough energy to vaporize, lowering their density and allowing the molecules to float.
Temperature, as you may know, is basically a measure of kinetic energy of the water molecules. These molecules will constantly collide and thus exchange some of that impulse.
That’s wy, at any temperature in any medium, there is a distribution of different velocities and some of those will be fast enough to change state. When these are near a water surface, they can leave the water and turn into steam, so to speak.
This happens all the time and also the other way around, which is why evaporation is faster in dry air.
Boiling is just the point, at which steam bubbles will spontaneously form, which is a whole different can of worms.
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