how does air pressure affect water boiling/ freezing points
In: 1
Say I grab you in a bear hug.
Whether or not you escape my bear hug will be influenced by two things:
1. How much energy you can put into struggling
2. How tightly I can squeeze
If you don’t struggle at all then it takes me very little pressure to squeeze you and keep you from escaping, or even to squish you against my chest completely. Similarly, if you can put a lot of energy into struggling then it would take a lot of pressure for me to squeeze you and keep you from breaking free.
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How hard you struggle in this analogy is temperature, or how much kinetic energy a substance has.
How tightly I can squeeze in this analogy is atmospheric pressure.
So, the less atmospheric pressure, the less kinetic energy it takes for a substance to change from solid to liquid, and again from liquid to gas.
Conversely, the greater the atmospheric pressure the more kinetic energy it takes for a phase change to occur.
For a static temperature, as atmospheric pressure increases, a substance will change from gas to liquid to solid.
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