If water contains Oxygen, then why can’t we breath it?
In: Biology
Basically to breathe you need to inhale and if you inhale you’d also get water which will fill your lungs and then there will be no space left for the air and you’ll choke and die
Oxygen in water is aqueous. Which means it’s completely dissolved. Typically we breath oxygen as 2 molecules bonded together. However in water those bonds break and it ionizes. Turning 2 bonded oxygen into 2 separate oxygen molecules each with a slight electrical charge.
Our lungs can’t handle that kind of oxygen. The same way fish can’t handle our airborne O2.
Also, the quantity of oxygen in air is much bigger then the quantity of oxygen in water. Our lungs don’t have a large enough capacity to process enough oxygen from water (which is also ticker and heavier than air).
I was taught that the water contains small amounts of oxygen, enought to be breathed by fishes but not enough for humans. When i was given this explanation i was like 7 so i dont know if its correct or the teacher said that because it was too complicated for us to understand.
Water contains oxygen atoms. Oxygen molecules which is what you need to breathe also contains oxygen atoms. But water and oxygen is very different compounds. This is like saying that if your house is made of wood, why can’t we just live in the woods instead of a house. They do share one common component but they are very different from each other.
2 reason:
First, there isn’t enought of it to sustain a human.
Second and most important, you absorb oxygen through your lungs, and your lungs react quite poorly to being filled with water.
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