Why does boiling water create bubbles in a pot? Was the water not already taking up the space?

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Why does boiling water create bubbles in a pot? Was the water not already taking up the space?

In: Physics

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The bubbles that form are still water, just water as a gas rather than water as a liquid.

These bubbles are always forming throughout the liquid water. However, the pressure of the liquid water is strong enough to immediately collapse the bubbles that form whenever the liquid water is below it’s boiling point. Once the water temperature reaches the boiling point, the pressure inside the bubbles that form is high enough that it pushes back against the liquid water enough that it doesn’t collapse.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Those bubbles are water vapor, steam. Since heat is applied at the bottom of the pot, that’s the hottest part, and where water evaporates into steam the quickest.

There can also be gases dissolved into the water, like the CO2 disolved in your soda, but typically these are quite small amounts.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The bubbles are actually bubbles of steam. When the water at the bottom turns into steam it is now a bubble which then floats to the top as it is less dense than water.

The water was taking up space, it is just the volume of a gas is higher than the volume of it’s liquid form so it looks like a lot of bubble but it might be a tiny bit of the total amount of water in the bubble.

These bubbles actually cause the volume of the water in the pot to decrease so the space it is taking up decreases in accordance to the amount of water lost to steam formation