Water
In Our Time
00:00
The Water Molecule
Trishone, could you describe in detail the water molecule for us? Okay, so we know that water is H20. But it also has what we call lone piers, some little bunny ears of electron density which sit perpendicular on 90 degrees to the orientation of the hydrogens. And this makes the local environment around the oxygen atom tetrahedral. When you put all that together, water forms these quite highly structured networks. This is why the water boils at a very high temperature because it has all these hydrogen bonds around it, holding it in place.
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