- Another factor making life on earth possible is frozen water’s set of unusual characteristics. Ice is such a common substance that most of us do not stop to consider that the balance of life depends on the simple chemical properties of ice. Ice is one of the few substances that expands when frozen.
- Most substances, when frozen become more dense and sink when placed in a container of the same substance in liquid form. But not ice. Since water expands by one tenth its volume when frozen, frozen water has the unusual characteristic of floating on top of liquid water. When rivers and lakes freeze in the winter, they freeze from the top down.
- If ice acted like almost all other compounds, it would sink, and rivers and lakes would freeze from the bottom up. All bodies of water would eventually become solid bodies of ice, eliminating most life as we know it. Astronomer Hugh Ross points out some of the other ways earth is perfectly balanced for life to exist:
- “As biochemists now concede, for life molecules to operate so that organisms can live requires an environment where liquid water is stable. This means that a planet cannot be too close to its star or too far away.
as small as 2 percent would rid the planet of all life . . .
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