Water Is Amazing -- World Water Day!

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today, we're going to talk about water. Because today is World Water Day. A day about raising awareness of the fact that, even though, here on Earth, there is enough clean, safe, drinking water for everybody to have enough, they don't. In fact, a billion of them don't. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Now first, I wanna cover how water is not just vital and amazing, but to this day, continues to surprise us. For instance, the Mpemba effect. The effect has been observed many, many, many times, but has never been explained. In fact, it is so famously anti-common sense, whenever people throughout history have observed it, they've tended to think that they just did something wrong. Which is why even though Aristotle himself wrote about it, it wasn't until the 20th century that it got its name.

Simply put, the Mpemba effect is the observation that under the right circumstances a glass of boiling hot water inside a freezer can turn to ice more quickly than a glass of cold water. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it can happen. A few possible causes have been thrown out. For instance, if you heat up or boil water, you remove some of the dissolved gas. And having less stuff dissolved in it may be what makes hot water easier to freeze.

It's the opposite of why we throw down salt during wintery weather. The salt dissolves into the water, putting more stuff in it, making it more difficult to freeze. But does that account for the entire effect? Well, some other possible explanations involve convection currents. A glass of warm water will contain more cycling convection currents, meaning that the top of that glass of water is warmer. And a glass of warm water will tend to freeze from the sides in, whereas the glass of cold water will tend to freeze all across the top down.

But once that top layer is frozen, it acts as an insulator, so all the water below it freezes more slowly. The point is that we still do not have a complete explanation of the effect. Part of the problem is how difficult it is to control every single variable. Should we be using equal masses of water or equal volumes? Should they be in the same freezer or in separate freezers? And what about evaporation? The warm water will be evaporating faster and evaporations into thermosis, it's losing heat more quickly than the cold water.

It's tough. But here's what we do know. Earth has a lot of water. 70% of Earth's surface is covered in it. And, interestingly enough, excluding fat, the human body is about 70% water. But when you were born you were a big old sack of water. That's right. A new baby is 78% water. Now, that number drops to 65% by the time that baby is 1 year old. And it'll drop even further to about 60% when you're an adult... man. Adult women are only about 55% water.

This is because women's physiology on average contains more fat, which doesn't hold as much water as lean tissue. In fact, fat people, regardless of gender, contain less water than thin people. Earth has a lot of water, but it's almost all salty. 96.5% of the water on Earth is in the oceans. Another 3.4% of Earth's water can be found in other large bodies of water or frozen inside glaciers or ice caps. But you, me, all the other animals we see, other manufactured products? They all contain water. About 0.0003% of Earth's total water.

And all of the storms and clouds and rain and thunderstorms happening contain only about 0.0001% of all the water Earth has. That's a lot of water, but despite that fact, almost a billion people on Earth don't have access to potable water. Potable comes from the Latin for "to drink," which means clean, safe water free from disease and contamination. The number of people on Earth who do not have sustainable access to potable water is equivalent to the number of people living inside the United States. Except multiplied by three.

And every year 3.5 million people die because of non-potable water-related diseases. That's equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles. So every year, Earth, our planet, loses an entire city of Los Angeles because people don't have access to clean water. So today, on World Water Day, it's worth talking about organizations that are making a difference, because things don't have to be the way that they are.

Organizations like Water.org help local communities build sustainable clean water solutions that the community itself will own. Now, they gave me a chance to go out to India to see this in action, along with WheezyWaiter and Strawburry17. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go, but those other two people were and they've got videos over on their channels about their experiences. So go check those out and if you wanna learn more, got water.org/vsauce to see how you can help.

And as always, thanks for watching.