Edit: Thanks for the awards! First time i’ve ever received any at all!
In: Chemistry
https://howeverythingworks.org/1997/01/10/question-730/#:~:text=But%20while%20a%20central%20fire,and%20it%20won’t%20melt.
To avoid melting the ice, people must keep the ice below its melting temperature. That means that they can’t add heat to ice indefinitely. But while a central fire will always deliver some heat to the ice of the igloo, the ice of the igloo will also tend to lose heat to colder air outside.
As long as the ice loses heat at least as fast as the fire delivers heat to it, the ice won’t become any warmer and it won’t melt. Water has a lot of latent heat. This means that it requires a lot of energy to transform water from ice to liquid, even though the temperature stays at 0°C.
Furthermore, water has a high specific heat capacity, which means it takes a lot of energy to change the temperature at all. And finally, even though the air inside is maybe ~10°C, the outside might be waaay below 0°C, and might might be windy, causing the equilibrium temperature of the ice to be well below 0.
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