Is there a way to destroy water? End the cycle. No turning into any other element, just gone.
In: Planetary Science
Nope! Nothing can be nothinged, matter is what matters it is not what it is. “But water can be made into energy” Its still a form aint it?
Water is a molecule composed of two elements, oxygen and hydrogen. It ceases to be water when the oxygen and hydrogen are separated through processes like electrolysis, however the result is an equivalent mass of the elements oxygen and hydrogen. These elements can combine again to form water or other molecules.
Like all matter the elements themselves are very difficult to completely destroy, only break into smaller parts. The only way we have found to destroy matter is to create antimatter, when it touches matter both antimatter and matter are converted into energy. Antimatter is very difficult to create and nobody has ever made it in large quantities. In theory, however, the matter does not cease to exist, it continues to exist as energy.
You could fire it into a black hole and it would be ripped down to some perhaps unknown primordial components, where it would stay till long after all the stars in the universe go dark.
There are several levels of turning water to not water:
Electrolysis. Applying a current through water can split the hydrogen and oxygen apart getting you hydrogen and oxygen gases. They easily recombine back into water with energy input (like a spark) and definitely doesn’t go far enough to meet your “no other element” or “just gone” qualifier.
Fusion. Chuck it into any star and the temperature is plenty high enough to split the hydrogen and oxygen. All stars will fuse the hydrogen into heavier elements and big enough stars will even fuse the oxygen into heavier elements. I’d argue that the water itself is pretty “gone” (you aren’t getting water back) but it definitely involved turning into other elements.
Annihilation. Bring the water molecule into contact with antimatter particles and they’ll annihilate, creating energy. It hasn’t changed into any other element, and it’s super gone. That said, this is a huge simplification because other particles can be produced in the process depending on the initial particles and their energies. When it comes to particle physics and energetic collisions/reactions there’s almost always a chance of particles (subatomic). Many are very short-lived rapidly decaying to other particles or a variety of forms of radiation (or some combination of both).
Matter-antimatter annihilation is probably the only one that goes far enough to qualify for destroy and no turning into any other element. Even then it isn’t “just gone”. It has some byproducts or energetic effects on the surrounding environment.
If you leave it in a plastic bottle, you take it out of the water cycle for a few thousand years.
The only ways I can think of are using it for fusion reactions (which only works with heavy water) or taking separating the hydrogen atoms, striping off the electrons and firing them into something with a particle accelerator.
In both cases, some of the water has been converted in a way that is extremely difficult to turn back to water again as you’d have to use a different nuclear reaction to get back to hydrogen again before being able to make water out of it again but they’re also both pretty extreme edge cases
At work they tell us not to throw the cooling thermite (boutet process of welding rail) into water because the water will absorb heat, 970+ BTUs of heat, convert to steam, then separate into its two parts, and create a hydrogen explosion.
I don’t really understand the Hydrogen explosion bit, but that’s what they told me. I thought it was just a steam explosion from the rapid 1000x expansion of steam, but idk.
Never done this because I don’t want to throw a grenade anywhere near myself.
But the water doesn’t really go anywhere. It just makes a state change to steam. (And maybe undergoes a few quick chemical reactions from the sudden increase in temperature. Can heat of thermite really separate the Ha and Os like electrolysis?)
Please, scientifically literate people expand on this and educate me.
If you’re excluding chemical reactions like elecrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), then your only option really is to annihilate it with anti-water molecules (2 anti-hydrogen atoms bound to an anti-oxygen atom). You’d get a bunch of gamma photons, some neutrinos, and some mesons. But there’s no way to make anything disappear into *nothing* without *something* happening.
Fuse the hydrogen and ogygen until its all iron, and then I promise it will never ever EVER be water again.
Electrolysis. Basically shocking water so hard it turns back into oxygen gas and hydrogen gas
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