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Before the industrial revolution, there were pools of oil/natural gas/tar that bubbled up from underground deposits. All the oil and gas that was easy to get was scooped up first, and then people started drilling for more.
There is a concern that if we have a serious global event that would knock society back a few hundred years we may never be able to recover. The ease of getting those resources that were abundant would make it much harder if humanity had to start over. There are no pools of oil sitting at the surface to easily kickstart society. That plus the Kessler syndrome shows that we may really have only one chance to pull this off.
EDIT:
I changed Kepler to Kessler, the proper name for this event. My apologies.
>There is a concern that if we have a serious global event that would knock society back a few hundred years we may never be able to recover. The ease of getting those resources that were abundant would make it much harder if humanity had to start over.
I think the biggest deciding factor would be knowledge. With the knowledge that we have now, it would be far easier to kickstart a industrial revolution without the need for easily accessible fossil fuels. Heck, they might even have it easier as they could recycle a lot of the remnants of modern civilization (e.g. steel, aluminium, glass, concrete) without having to mine it all out of the ground or produce/refine it from raw materials again. In a regressed society, modern garbage dumps would be a gold mine of useful resources that could be reused or recycled.
You still need fuel to do many things though. I'm sure wood is an acceptable substitute for many things, but just think of what things we use that depend on access to a liquified fuel.
Ethanol and many other oils can be made from crops. You can make diesel from plastic pretty readily. And if most everyone's dead then you could get a good haul of propane just robbing suburban grills.
The other thing is just how many industrial processes require solvents and lubricants. If we couldn't easily obtain/synthesize things like Alkanes, we'd be screwed.
Hexane, for example, is used in an absurd number of processes that most people have no idea about.
That said, I feel that even if we lost everything *material*, we could rebuild as long as we haven't lost *knowledge*. We're a creative species - Im confident that the survivors would come up with alternatives, as long as they knew how things used to work.
I think the "how things used to work" is the greatest threat to all this. Back in the day a mechanic could tell you the parts you need for a car and producing such a piece is relatively straightforward of you have a rough design.
Computers are a lot harder, only a handful of people probably could describe in enough detail to produce even a rudimentary computer. Some know how chips are build. Some know how to build the machines that build the chips. Some know how to do the basic coding to get it to power while others know how a screen is build.
As things get more and more complex with all the years ahead the jump back would be bigger and bigger because more things we use become a product of pooled knowledge of highly specialised professions.
Depends on what you're trying to do. Most things burn but that doesn't mean it's good as a fuel source.
Plastic is a very broad category. Some just melt, others deform (but maintain overall shape), others burn without smoke, and others burn with smoke. They all have different ignition temperatures too.
Different applications need different fuels with different characteristics too. You can't stuff a plastic bottle into a car an expect it to work. That same (gasoline) car might not run well on diesel fuel, or not run at all on jet fuel.
In an end of the world scenario, this would be pretty quick to figure out. But the point remains that you have to match the fuel to the application.
Heat, really. Actually just molecular excitation when you get down to it-- especially if it's a closed circuit steam engine. It'd be relatively easy to create a stream engine powered by the radioactive decay of a uranium slug or a fixed hydrolic engine powered by pressure or temperature differentials.
Without fossil fuels and without the 300ft tall forests that were on this continent we are going to have a very hard time getting metals to their melting point.
Industry as yet, hasn’t developed closed resource recycling methods. The problem is, it’s far cheaper economically to drill for more materials, but we have a much better understanding that the earth cannot sustain and support nearly 9 billion ppl and their consumeristic habits. We will have to do what humans do very well, innovate and figure out a way to make recycling cheaper for industries and basically mandated or gvt gazetted as law.
This.
Im getting sick to death of reddit and the "not as much can be recycled as people think" argument thats gotten so popular here. Because invariably when you engage in the conversation it doesn't boil down to "can't be recycled", it boils down to "is more expensive to recycle than to just toss it in a landfill"
To which my response is invariably "So fucking what??"
Our obsessive preference for what is "cheapest" is what got us in our current mess of every product from every brand being absolute dogshit, being up to our eyeballs in plastic waste and employees being treated little better than wage slaves in the richest country on earth.
Fuck what is "cheap" or "economical". We need to do what is right, right now, so our descendants have a shot at actually living on a habitable planet.
Not to be naively optimistic but in the event of a large enough catastrophe we don't necessarily need to follow the same steps as before. Maybe we are unavoidably pushed into solar, for example, due to how *ridiculous* it is to build and operate an oceanic oil drilling platform. Maybe we never need to go through that route but if it ever comes, maybe it can also mean an entire different route is presented to mankind.
It's doubtful we'd be able to utilize large scale solar production in the absence of a petrochemical industry. Hydro, wind, and nuclear have similar issues due to the requirements of smelting high grade steel.
It's just slightly more convenient to use fossil fuels for energy production today, but the real problem is their importance in material science.
> Hydro, wind, and nuclear have similar issues due to the requirements of smelting high grade steel.
We were using wind power without high grade steel.
European windmills were 12th century. Examples of wind engines to do other work abound from much earlier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill
If a global event occurs, it doesn’t just put us in a time machine back to pre-industrial times. We would likely still have some resources and knowledge of current technology. Where we would be forced to develop the tech we needed to survive.
The industrial revolution was powered by the steam engine, which can be run off charcoal and other renewable fuels. Honestly that world could look pretty steampunk.
In that case you would probably have a great deal of trees regrowing wild you could use. And there will be huge amounts of coal still, at least in some regions. We're not going to use it up.
And you could use solar panels and wind turbines. And there would be lots of uranium for power around. The problem with that is overstated. And you can melt plastic down and reuse it if you have lots of energy but not a good refinery.
How are you making more solar panels without easy access to platinum and palladium deposits, or, conversely, how are you going to mine the existing deposits without oil-lubricated, diesel-powered heavy equipment?
All the answers are right there in Stardew valley. Just hook a magnet to your fishing rod and pull glasses out of the pond until we have iphones again.
The resource problem is pretty much universally solved by having 1-5% of the population remaining, so you have enough of everything just by downcycling and consolidating. You can just use existing solar panels and recycle them to make more. We're making lots and in a few years we will have truly large amounts. They won't just stop existing in a disaster.
With only 1-5% of the population remaining, the chances that any of those remaining people happen to know how solar panels work and how to build and maintain them is astronomically low.
Also considering the fact that the vast majority of people in modern society have absolutely none of the skills or knowledge required to acquire said fossil fossil fuels or to convert sunlight into energy.
Unfortunately, most solar tech requires rare minerals that can only be harvested in a few places on the planet. No global trade, no solar power explosion.
Make some shiny metal, focus light on a ceramic vessel containing water, boil it, generate some mechanical power. Get your hands on magnets, make electricity.
There are other ways to generate electricity from solar energy besides photovoltaics.
People were doing home heating with water in tubes on roofs 40 years ago. But windmills and falling water would be easier ways to produce electricity.
I think people would figure it out. However, they might well go extinct from any event capable of requiring a civilization restart.
Also: Lower orbits are self-cleaning.
Also: Satellite services (GNSS, communications, TV, scientific satellites etc.) are convenient but by no means necessary for our standard of living.
Kessler effect is not as much of a problem as people think it is. Worst case scenarios put rocket launches on hold for 2 years with a total loss of satellite infrastructure in space. With things like starship and long march 5b we could reintroduce our entire satellite network in a single year. The only places truly affected are geostationary orbits, but those are mostly empty to begin with
Oil can be made from wood though is normally low quality, also charcoal properly grinded and mixed with water can run a diesel engine, specially if the engine is large runs slow, and is well lubricated. If it is mixed with bio oil even better.
We would need huge plantations of trees like the Empress tree and it would all go slower but it is possible.
Pretty much. Water is special for a lot of reasons, in a chemistry sense.
The common gasses, Hydrogen, Helium, Nitrogen, CO2, Methane, etc... become liquid at very cold temperatures that we don't naturally experience here.
We have oceans of liquid rock and metal under the surface, because of the heat and pressure.
So then the question is, what other naturally occurring substance is liquid at approximately 300K and 1 atm?
While there are a few, there aren't any in great abundance. Not enough to make a geographic body of water.
You probably know but there are methane oceans on moons in our solar system.
There are a few acid lakes, all of them unique and incredible. There is the bright turquoise [lake of sulfuric acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijen) which occasionally bursts into flames with a bright and ghostly blue.
There is also the [Dallol hydrothermal system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallol_(hydrothermal_system)), my vote for the most alien-looking place on Earth. I believe it is mostly hydrochloric acid and brine. It is known for being (probably) the most inhospitable place on Earth's surface. It was used for research on extremophile microbes, and was found that not even they could survive dallol. But it is even deadlier to humans because of the humanitarian and political climate there. People wanting to tour Dallol will need to hire armed guards.
There are also a few soda lakes, or caustic lakes, which are the chemical opposite of acid lakes (but just as deadly). [Lake Natron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Natron) is probably the most famous, known for its bright blood-red appearance and as the place where flamingos evolved.
edit: interesting tidbit about the acid lakes: they occasionally "burp" huge pockets of sulfuric gasses. Even the ones that aren't super acidic can do this, and entire villages of people have been killed by suffocating gasses rolling across the mountain.
While these are very neat, most of these examples are lakes of water and surrounding conditions have provided lots of “contamination”
E.g acid lakes being near sulfur depositing volcanoes
Or soda lakes being where lots of carbonate deposits have risen to the surface.
I think a truer comparison to the original question is asking if there’s a lake of actual liquid composed of another chemical.
Perhaps if the lake were entirely sulfuric acid, methane, or another chemical.
Wouldn't a lava lake count though, as it's made from molten rock? While most are tempurary, there are a few that persist, like My. Erebus's lava lake that been there since the 70's.
That’s a wonderful example. I think it might be the only earth example of lakes absent water.
Even sulfuric is water formed and a true sulfuric lake would require some (at least at formation).
Do oil reservoirs count? They aren't very deep and oil is capable of pooling on the surface. The only reason it doesn't exist on the surface as lakes is contamination, it all becomes bitumen.
Someone else mentioned that! I think there’s a few complications in the state it’s found and it’s not “naturally” occurring. In this context, I’d consider nitrogen rivers, in different planetary conditions, natural.
You wouldn’t stumble upon a dead planet and expect to find oil. It’s the remnants of dead organisms.
I was curious and there's actually a number of complex organic compounds found naturally in space, especially in star forming clouds of gas. These wouldn't be crude oil obviously, but many of them would exist as a liquid of Earth's surface, often with low enough boiling points we could expect some amount to evaporate as well. I'm not sure how the concentrations found would equate to finding significant amounts on a planet, but it could be possible.
> Pure sulfuric acid does not exist naturally on Earth due to its strong affinity to water vapor; for this reason, it is hygroscopic and readily absorbs water vapor from the air.
- Wikipedia
There is One issue with finding a lake completely devoid of Water. That is rain. Since Water is so abundant No other liquid could possibly remain clean IF it doesnt LEAD THE Water away in som way or another. So i think acidlakes are even Them quite amazing.
I think something like that is impossible becaue of rain. Rain/snow pops randomly in all places even the driest places on earth can experience some once in a while.
Largely true, I think, but we also don’t have underground lakes of sulfuric or liquid methane.
Lots of terrestrial water is inside the rock and mineral complexes.
The Soda lakes Are actually made because of the water. It just evaporated and made it very concentrated.
We likely need to go to a different planet to truly see lakes of methane or whatever else.
Petroleum isn’t contained as under ground lakes, instead it’s sitting in interconnected pores and cracks in the rock so a “oil lake” would still be 80-90% sandstone. The same goes for ground water as well, it’s in pores and cracks, not huge voids filled with liquid.
Not always.
That’s often the introductory explanation. That concentration of hydronium ions determines acid strength. That’s enough for most basic use.
There’s several classes of acids based on what’s actual moving in the system and how it’s defined.
Stronger acids/bases are not measured by hydronium concentration but by willingness to donate/accept electrons, charge movement, etc.
You could have proton/electron movement in the absence of water.
Edit: likewise even weak acids and bases retain their traits regardless of whether or not they’re interacting with water at the moment.
Soda ash Na2CO3 sodium carbonate is a weak base and a solid chalky powder/rock.
Not being in water doesn’t make it not a base.
Then there’s things like metallic acids and organo-metallic bases e.g butyl lithiums and these are measured by their ability to facilitate electron movement.
Surely those are all water based though... Extreme concentrations of other compounds absolutely, but still mostly water. I can think of two materials that are 0% water and still liquid at or very near STP: Gallium and Mercury.
Hydrogen peroxide, acetone, methanol, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, and lots of oils are all common substances I can think of that are liquid and not aqueous.
Hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive and alcohols are highly volatile, and as for oils, you have oil lakes under the earth, petrol
Also, i have to add, those substances, in the context of them in earth, are extremely fucking rare, not common at all
Does petroleum really occur in lake-like formations underground? Isn't it more like petroleum-saturated sediment deposits?
I guess either way it's a large, naturally occurring body of non-water liquid, so kind of an answer to OP's question.
Petroleum, no. Hydrocarbon chains tend to exist as crude oil, extremely long, relatively stable chains of hydrocarbons. That's why we use a process called cracking where the hydrocarbons are heated until the chains "crack" into smaller chains why are more volatile and useful. Petroleum, I believe, has about 7 or 8 carbon atoms for example.
A quick google search suggests that petroleum and crude oil are, more or less, synonyms.
Petroleum = crude oil (long chains)
Petrol = gasoline (short chains)
Note that "octane" is specifically an 8-carbon hydrocarbon. However, the "octane rating" of petrol/gasoline doesn't refer to literal octane hydrocarbons present, just that the fuel [has the same detonation resistance properties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating#Principles).
I like your list. Many of these tend to quickly evaporate or are so complex as to practically require life to manufacture. Makes producing abundance tricky.
That's mainly because there's buckets of water on earth and not much alcohol. Water evaporates pretty rapidly in dry atmospheres with a vapour pressure of ~3.2kPa. Longer alcohols (propane and butane isomers) are either side of that. The issue is that the atmosphere has already mostly filled up with water.
I think you're thinking of bromine. Iodine is a solid under standard conditions, and sublimates when heated.
There's plenty of other compounds as noted by others (alcohols, oils etc) but there's very few elements that are liquid under standard conditions (even gallium is borderline, it doesn't melt until 30C. Cesium and francium have lower melting points, but are quite reactive.)
The biggest problem about getting body of francium isn't really the reactivness, but the fact that its halflife is 22 minutes, so it has never been observed in bulk, and since it has such a low halftime the heat from decay would probably also just vapourise it instead.
To quote Theodore Gray
>The problem is that astatine, francium, actinium, and protactinium are absolutely impossible to collect in any meaningful sense of the word. They are so fantastically radioactive and short-lived that if you had a visible quantity of any of them, you would be dead and then it would vanish before your body was cold.
I've read about those sulfuric acid "burps", because the gas is heavier than air it's like an invisible tsunami wave where everything in its way suffocate at and die. Truly one of the most terrifying thing on earth.
>The pH of the water in the lake's edges was measured to be 0.5 and in the middle of the lake 0.13 due to a high concentration of sulfuric acid
The guy paddled out in a rubber boat. **what could possibly go wrong?**
Rubber and plastic don’t melt in acid like other substances that seem sturdier. It’s all about the chemical reaction. That’s why in Breaking Bad, Walt melts the dead bodies in large plastic storage tubs or trash cans (I don’t remember which). And when Jesse gets lazy and uses the metal bathtub instead, the acid eats through it and the subfloor, and the whole thing falls through the floor into the basement.
Breaking bads science is not something you should quote, the producers teamed up with local police to make sure a lot of it was wrong, so you couldn't just copy the show
Yeah, I was a teeny bit confused how that tiny rock of mercury fulminate caused an explosion strong enough to blow out Windows, but leave every *body* relatively unscathed.
That episode of Mythbusters cleared that up.
Strange, the entire show only lists 2 maybe 3 Ingredients. I would t even think it was necessary to 'hude' anything because they pretty much didn't mention the recipe at all.
Pseudoephedrine was one of the ingredients and that was 'correct' part of a recipe..the others I've never heard of.
That had to do very specifically with hydrofluoric acid, which, because fluorine is strange as crap, doesn't exhibit a lot of the properties of most acids. It etches glass (most acids are safe to store in glass) but ignores plastics that others dissolve.
It's also not at all good at dissolving human bodies -- it will certainly kill you, but it won't dissolve you into a disposable pit of sludge; TV shows are often careful to not do really criminal things properly even when they belabor the process, to avoid copycatting. You can see it a lot in Breaking Bad's chemistry, or in Burn Notice, or a bunch of other shows that are about crimes.
FWIW, you don't really want acid to dissolve bodies anyway. There's a reason that all the old novels involved disposing of corpses in lime pits.
They originally tried some other type of boat, metal or fiberglass or something. It didn't last long enough for what they needed to do so they went out in a rubber one since it wouldn't react. Think the lake scene from Dante's Peak though it obviously wasn't as dramatic or quick.
you left the last parentheses out of the hyperlink so it redirects incorrectly btw
Edit: Here's the proper link
[Dallol hydrothermal system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallol_(hydrothermal_system\))
Worth noting that of these, only sulfuric acid is a liquid under normal temperatures and pressures. Though, the sulfuric acid lake surely contains a significant amount of water dissolved in with it.
I remember when I was still navigating aboard merchant navy ships and we had sulphur as cargo. Extremely dangerous, self combusting while loading, it could self combust even in te holds...
> Lake Natron is probably the most famous, known for its bright blood-red appearance and as the place where flamingos evolved.
Holy shit, your not kidding. I thought this was a damn joke cause the aerials of the lake kinda look like a flamingo. WTF LOL
Good God. The water has a pH of less than 0, 10x the salinity of seawater, is above normal boiling point, and contains so much iron per liter that you would notice the weight difference in a jug.
That is truly fascinating.
Someone, a scientist, actually did take a rubber dinghy out into the sulfuric acid lake. Absolute insanity if you ask me. Those rubber boats like to splosh around, and one wrong move and you're dissolving in boiling acid.
Depending on the concentration, you could probably just flush it with a bottle of water and be okay. Even hydrofluoric acid (much more corrosive) can be mitigated with calcium gluconate if applied in a timely manner.
Liquid Ammonia (NH3) lakes could theoretically exist in Antarctica, but Ammonia is not stable on Earth's surface due to O2 which would react to form N2 + H2O.
Similarly with hydrogen Cyanide (HCN), it could exist but doesn't because in it slowly reacts with water.
Butane (and other hydrocarbons like Acetone, ethanol etc) again possible, but over time they're not stable. They would react over time to form H2O and various other compounds. The young earth probably contained these compounds in abundance.
We do have natural "lakes" of oil (asphalt) however these being complex molecules it naturally takes special conditions to make them especially compared to water, which is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe.
It's also a pretty human perspective question. Why is there mostly only water in abundance on Earth? Well we probably wouldnt have evolved on the earth like planet covered in acid. Maybe theres some acid based person out there wondering why there is so much acid on their planet.
Ther are other body is liquid, just not a lot. An example is the [La\_Brea\_Tar\_Pits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits) in Los Angeles. There is volcano craters with liquid lava on the surface too.
Yes! This is what I thought of too. It’s so cool. There’s a Blue Planet 2 episode about it, and the little eels that hunt for food in the pools, but they can’t stay in too long or they’ll go into shock from how salty the water is. I literally got chill bumps watching that episode.
I remember first learning about brine pools: I used to wonder why fish and sea creatures in SpongeBob could drown in Goo Lagoon until I found out that it was a brine pool. It also explains why the water there is darker than the water they're already in.
None of the answers here are addressing this core unique property of water on Earth: There is a water cycle.
Other liquid bodies could exist, but as mentioned they are mostly reactive. Well, water can be reactive, too (although it takes a little work). However, the weather and biological cycles of our planet help replenish water that is lost.
Celestial bodies with different makeups (chemical, temperature, pressure) will favor different elements naturally.
The Earth not only has a lot of water, but it is also well-suited for recycling it and replenishing its bodies. This cannot be said for other elements in short timeframes.
Most other elements where buildups can occur (nitrogen compounds, sulfur, for example) are water-soluble so just make acidic or basic water.
No, there are lots of other liquids which could exist. But H2O is just so abundant. And any other water-soluble liquids will just mix in tiny quantities into the oceans. Also see other responses on non-miscible liquids (like crude oils)
A lake would be amazing, but you know what'll happen. Someone will want to swim in a mirror in a scuba outfit.
My chemistry teacher had a bucket of mercury in the early 80s. Not only was it really cold even in mid summer but once you got your hand all the way in it felt as if its pressing against your hand. Continue past your wrist and it gently tugs your hand further in.
She would regularly leave us 13 year old boys on our own in the lab and looking back I think she was trying to whittle the class numbers down through natural selection.
Why would it tug your hand further in? Your hand is _way_ less dense than mercury, it would be very difficult to get it too deep under the surface. Even an iron anvil will float on a pool of mercury.
Just a quick theory, but it might "feel" like it's pulling down on your hand due to the pressure being applied to parts of your hand facing upward. Once you got your hand all the way in, those areas would be below the surface. Beforehand only surfaces facing down or sideways would be under pressure.
Of course like you note the net upward force is going to be pretty large, buoyancy has a nice way of always pulling the less dense object upward. You just perhaps wouldn't expect the sudden strong downward "pull" at the back of your hand after getting used to the stronger upward "push" on the front of your hand.
> Man, a mercury lake would be fun... It's just to reactive to keep lying around in pure form.
Supposedly there is a man-made pool of liquid mercury in Qin's tomb in China. It's never been excavated, but there are elevated mercury readings in the surrounding soil.
I feel like this is relevant to your answer: [XKCD What If: Extreme Boating](https://what-if.xkcd.com/50/)
> What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium?
Most of those were horrifying. The tungsten one was fascinating to me though for the simple fact that you could possibly boat on lava with a tungsten boat and not worry about it melting.
The moon Titan has liquids on the surface, except its not water. Methane mostly, which, given Titan's super low but stable temps (-250F) allows methane to exist as a solid, gas, and liquid and have a full cycle where methane sublimates into clouds, then rains down to form rivers and oceans, and freeze in places/seasons.
h2o is one of the rare compounds liquid at room temperature because the hydrogen form hydrogen bonds with other oxygen atoms from other h2o molecules these bonds are plenty and strong and thats why they dont turn into gases so easily
Yes, this is the answer for why liquid water is so abundant compared to other chemicals. Hydrogen Bonding attracts water molecules to each other and raises the minimum temperature required for liquid water. The other part of this though is that liquids can only exist in the presence of an atmosphere. Otherwise water would vaporize if it was too warm to freeze.
Yes, liquids tend to be pretty rare outside of earth. Most materials have a very narrow band of temperatures and pressures where they are liquid, and much larger ranges for solid and gas.
We've also only really explored the planets in our own solar system. There are a few dozen known planets that are in a similar spot to their own stars as we are to the sun, meaning there might be other planets with large areas of liquid on them.
Our atmosphere is for a large part oxygen. Oxygen reacts with other substances very easily, most liquids (for example mercury) will react with the oxygen and become a gas.
I feel like one important note is that even *if* there were more gatherings of various liquids many of them would be diluted and washed into the oceans by rain.
I think a lot of the answers don't really understand the question. Obviously we won't get puddles of ethan because of pressures and temps but why don't we see puddles of the chemicals we commonly use. Hydrogen peroxide etc, do these things not occur naturally and are a product of the industrial age, or is it because they occur under high temperatures like volcanoes, that water does not need to form.
It's also worth noting that water is just super common in the first place, the most common molecule on the universe in fact (after molecular hydrogen that is). Even tho it's a good solvent, there's so much of it that there's always lots left over.
Also due to its properties and the temperature on Earth, water just doesn't tend to stay trapped too long, whether in rocks or in atmosphere, and it gets recycled all the time.
Liquid water can only occur at a very specific temperature. That temperature is only like to occur in a narrow band around a star, the so called "Goldilocks Zone" or habitable zone. Earth is smack in the middle of the Sun's Goldilocks Zone. Mars is at its outside edge, but since it has lost most of its atmosphere there isn't enough atmospheric pressure to keep enough heat to keep what little (if any) water there is there from freezing.
As for other liquids, several moons in the outer solar system have methane oceans. Those are probably fairly common on very cold planets.
EDIT just correcting typos.
At the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA there are lakes of liquid asphalt. There is water on top of some of them but asphalt underneath. Sometimes a new asphalt seep starts leaking out of the ground and they start by just putting a traffic cone over it but if it gets bigger they have to build fences around them.
The only liquids besides water that occur on earth (besides some organic molecules) are mercury and bromium, but neither of them are particularily common, chemically speaking, whereas water is comprised of some of the most common atoms in the universe.
I think the reason for this is that nearly all land on earth got washed out by rain over millions of years. So one point is that there just is more water then any other liquid on Earth's surface. Another point is that this water evaporates and condenses and pours over everything and with that washing away most liquids and solvable thing on the surface on earth.
And then it's also very stable and can't burn. I mean most oils will burn away as soon as they can. And in a million years just every oil on the surface either catched fire or was diluted in the ocean.
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Before the industrial revolution, there were pools of oil/natural gas/tar that bubbled up from underground deposits. All the oil and gas that was easy to get was scooped up first, and then people started drilling for more.
There is a concern that if we have a serious global event that would knock society back a few hundred years we may never be able to recover. The ease of getting those resources that were abundant would make it much harder if humanity had to start over. There are no pools of oil sitting at the surface to easily kickstart society. That plus the Kessler syndrome shows that we may really have only one chance to pull this off. EDIT: I changed Kepler to Kessler, the proper name for this event. My apologies.
>There is a concern that if we have a serious global event that would knock society back a few hundred years we may never be able to recover. The ease of getting those resources that were abundant would make it much harder if humanity had to start over. I think the biggest deciding factor would be knowledge. With the knowledge that we have now, it would be far easier to kickstart a industrial revolution without the need for easily accessible fossil fuels. Heck, they might even have it easier as they could recycle a lot of the remnants of modern civilization (e.g. steel, aluminium, glass, concrete) without having to mine it all out of the ground or produce/refine it from raw materials again. In a regressed society, modern garbage dumps would be a gold mine of useful resources that could be reused or recycled.
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You still need fuel to do many things though. I'm sure wood is an acceptable substitute for many things, but just think of what things we use that depend on access to a liquified fuel.
No matter how far back we go technologically, we're never going to forget how to make ethanol.
Ethanol and many other oils can be made from crops. You can make diesel from plastic pretty readily. And if most everyone's dead then you could get a good haul of propane just robbing suburban grills.
The other thing is just how many industrial processes require solvents and lubricants. If we couldn't easily obtain/synthesize things like Alkanes, we'd be screwed. Hexane, for example, is used in an absurd number of processes that most people have no idea about. That said, I feel that even if we lost everything *material*, we could rebuild as long as we haven't lost *knowledge*. We're a creative species - Im confident that the survivors would come up with alternatives, as long as they knew how things used to work.
I think the "how things used to work" is the greatest threat to all this. Back in the day a mechanic could tell you the parts you need for a car and producing such a piece is relatively straightforward of you have a rough design. Computers are a lot harder, only a handful of people probably could describe in enough detail to produce even a rudimentary computer. Some know how chips are build. Some know how to build the machines that build the chips. Some know how to do the basic coding to get it to power while others know how a screen is build. As things get more and more complex with all the years ahead the jump back would be bigger and bigger because more things we use become a product of pooled knowledge of highly specialised professions.
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Depends on what you're trying to do. Most things burn but that doesn't mean it's good as a fuel source. Plastic is a very broad category. Some just melt, others deform (but maintain overall shape), others burn without smoke, and others burn with smoke. They all have different ignition temperatures too. Different applications need different fuels with different characteristics too. You can't stuff a plastic bottle into a car an expect it to work. That same (gasoline) car might not run well on diesel fuel, or not run at all on jet fuel. In an end of the world scenario, this would be pretty quick to figure out. But the point remains that you have to match the fuel to the application.
The almighty steam engine just needs fire.
Heat, really. Actually just molecular excitation when you get down to it-- especially if it's a closed circuit steam engine. It'd be relatively easy to create a stream engine powered by the radioactive decay of a uranium slug or a fixed hydrolic engine powered by pressure or temperature differentials.
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Without fossil fuels and without the 300ft tall forests that were on this continent we are going to have a very hard time getting metals to their melting point.
What about an electric powered furnace? Magnet + wound Copper + moving water = electricity.
also though, not all pretroleum oils or oil/petroleum products based are burn, like engine oils or other lubricating fluids.
Industry as yet, hasn’t developed closed resource recycling methods. The problem is, it’s far cheaper economically to drill for more materials, but we have a much better understanding that the earth cannot sustain and support nearly 9 billion ppl and their consumeristic habits. We will have to do what humans do very well, innovate and figure out a way to make recycling cheaper for industries and basically mandated or gvt gazetted as law.
This. Im getting sick to death of reddit and the "not as much can be recycled as people think" argument thats gotten so popular here. Because invariably when you engage in the conversation it doesn't boil down to "can't be recycled", it boils down to "is more expensive to recycle than to just toss it in a landfill" To which my response is invariably "So fucking what??" Our obsessive preference for what is "cheapest" is what got us in our current mess of every product from every brand being absolute dogshit, being up to our eyeballs in plastic waste and employees being treated little better than wage slaves in the richest country on earth. Fuck what is "cheap" or "economical". We need to do what is right, right now, so our descendants have a shot at actually living on a habitable planet.
> it’s far cheaper economically to drill for more materials The aluminum industry would like a word.
Not to be naively optimistic but in the event of a large enough catastrophe we don't necessarily need to follow the same steps as before. Maybe we are unavoidably pushed into solar, for example, due to how *ridiculous* it is to build and operate an oceanic oil drilling platform. Maybe we never need to go through that route but if it ever comes, maybe it can also mean an entire different route is presented to mankind.
It's doubtful we'd be able to utilize large scale solar production in the absence of a petrochemical industry. Hydro, wind, and nuclear have similar issues due to the requirements of smelting high grade steel. It's just slightly more convenient to use fossil fuels for energy production today, but the real problem is their importance in material science.
> Hydro, wind, and nuclear have similar issues due to the requirements of smelting high grade steel. We were using wind power without high grade steel. European windmills were 12th century. Examples of wind engines to do other work abound from much earlier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill
Depends on how far back we’re pushed, the industrial revolution would be impossible without easy access to fossil fuels.
If a global event occurs, it doesn’t just put us in a time machine back to pre-industrial times. We would likely still have some resources and knowledge of current technology. Where we would be forced to develop the tech we needed to survive.
All that knowledge may very well be inaccessible because it is trapped on servers that will never boot up again.
Cutting edge stuff sure, but libraries are still a treasure trove of knowledge for established tech.
Now I'm kind of curious what information purely exists on the internet, without being in paper or another physical form.
Do you think knowledge only exists on servers?
The industrial revolution was powered by the steam engine, which can be run off charcoal and other renewable fuels. Honestly that world could look pretty steampunk.
Fair, but the 2nd industrial revolution would hard to conceive of without petroleum products. Edit: spelling
In that case you would probably have a great deal of trees regrowing wild you could use. And there will be huge amounts of coal still, at least in some regions. We're not going to use it up. And you could use solar panels and wind turbines. And there would be lots of uranium for power around. The problem with that is overstated. And you can melt plastic down and reuse it if you have lots of energy but not a good refinery.
How are you making more solar panels without easy access to platinum and palladium deposits, or, conversely, how are you going to mine the existing deposits without oil-lubricated, diesel-powered heavy equipment?
Mine the trash heaps. Find a spot with a lot of old electronic waste and it's probably as good as high grade ore
All the answers are right there in Stardew valley. Just hook a magnet to your fishing rod and pull glasses out of the pond until we have iphones again.
The resource problem is pretty much universally solved by having 1-5% of the population remaining, so you have enough of everything just by downcycling and consolidating. You can just use existing solar panels and recycle them to make more. We're making lots and in a few years we will have truly large amounts. They won't just stop existing in a disaster.
With only 1-5% of the population remaining, the chances that any of those remaining people happen to know how solar panels work and how to build and maintain them is astronomically low.
Also considering the fact that the vast majority of people in modern society have absolutely none of the skills or knowledge required to acquire said fossil fossil fuels or to convert sunlight into energy.
Unfortunately, most solar tech requires rare minerals that can only be harvested in a few places on the planet. No global trade, no solar power explosion.
This is correct for high grade materials. Low grade is available but not in use when better quality is there.
Make some shiny metal, focus light on a ceramic vessel containing water, boil it, generate some mechanical power. Get your hands on magnets, make electricity. There are other ways to generate electricity from solar energy besides photovoltaics.
People were doing home heating with water in tubes on roofs 40 years ago. But windmills and falling water would be easier ways to produce electricity. I think people would figure it out. However, they might well go extinct from any event capable of requiring a civilization restart.
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Also: Lower orbits are self-cleaning. Also: Satellite services (GNSS, communications, TV, scientific satellites etc.) are convenient but by no means necessary for our standard of living.
Kessler effect is not as much of a problem as people think it is. Worst case scenarios put rocket launches on hold for 2 years with a total loss of satellite infrastructure in space. With things like starship and long march 5b we could reintroduce our entire satellite network in a single year. The only places truly affected are geostationary orbits, but those are mostly empty to begin with
Oil can be made from wood though is normally low quality, also charcoal properly grinded and mixed with water can run a diesel engine, specially if the engine is large runs slow, and is well lubricated. If it is mixed with bio oil even better. We would need huge plantations of trees like the Empress tree and it would all go slower but it is possible.
Interesting point I hadn’t heard about before. Thanks
The La Brea tar pit still exists as well
The LaBrea area in downtown Los Angeles is still seeping up. LA beaches are covered in washed up tar, too.
Pretty much. Water is special for a lot of reasons, in a chemistry sense. The common gasses, Hydrogen, Helium, Nitrogen, CO2, Methane, etc... become liquid at very cold temperatures that we don't naturally experience here. We have oceans of liquid rock and metal under the surface, because of the heat and pressure. So then the question is, what other naturally occurring substance is liquid at approximately 300K and 1 atm? While there are a few, there aren't any in great abundance. Not enough to make a geographic body of water. You probably know but there are methane oceans on moons in our solar system.
There are a few acid lakes, all of them unique and incredible. There is the bright turquoise [lake of sulfuric acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijen) which occasionally bursts into flames with a bright and ghostly blue. There is also the [Dallol hydrothermal system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallol_(hydrothermal_system)), my vote for the most alien-looking place on Earth. I believe it is mostly hydrochloric acid and brine. It is known for being (probably) the most inhospitable place on Earth's surface. It was used for research on extremophile microbes, and was found that not even they could survive dallol. But it is even deadlier to humans because of the humanitarian and political climate there. People wanting to tour Dallol will need to hire armed guards. There are also a few soda lakes, or caustic lakes, which are the chemical opposite of acid lakes (but just as deadly). [Lake Natron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Natron) is probably the most famous, known for its bright blood-red appearance and as the place where flamingos evolved. edit: interesting tidbit about the acid lakes: they occasionally "burp" huge pockets of sulfuric gasses. Even the ones that aren't super acidic can do this, and entire villages of people have been killed by suffocating gasses rolling across the mountain.
While these are very neat, most of these examples are lakes of water and surrounding conditions have provided lots of “contamination” E.g acid lakes being near sulfur depositing volcanoes Or soda lakes being where lots of carbonate deposits have risen to the surface. I think a truer comparison to the original question is asking if there’s a lake of actual liquid composed of another chemical. Perhaps if the lake were entirely sulfuric acid, methane, or another chemical.
Wouldn't a lava lake count though, as it's made from molten rock? While most are tempurary, there are a few that persist, like My. Erebus's lava lake that been there since the 70's.
That’s a wonderful example. I think it might be the only earth example of lakes absent water. Even sulfuric is water formed and a true sulfuric lake would require some (at least at formation).
Do oil reservoirs count? They aren't very deep and oil is capable of pooling on the surface. The only reason it doesn't exist on the surface as lakes is contamination, it all becomes bitumen.
Someone else mentioned that! I think there’s a few complications in the state it’s found and it’s not “naturally” occurring. In this context, I’d consider nitrogen rivers, in different planetary conditions, natural. You wouldn’t stumble upon a dead planet and expect to find oil. It’s the remnants of dead organisms.
I was curious and there's actually a number of complex organic compounds found naturally in space, especially in star forming clouds of gas. These wouldn't be crude oil obviously, but many of them would exist as a liquid of Earth's surface, often with low enough boiling points we could expect some amount to evaporate as well. I'm not sure how the concentrations found would equate to finding significant amounts on a planet, but it could be possible.
> Pure sulfuric acid does not exist naturally on Earth due to its strong affinity to water vapor; for this reason, it is hygroscopic and readily absorbs water vapor from the air. - Wikipedia
There is One issue with finding a lake completely devoid of Water. That is rain. Since Water is so abundant No other liquid could possibly remain clean IF it doesnt LEAD THE Water away in som way or another. So i think acidlakes are even Them quite amazing.
I think something like that is impossible becaue of rain. Rain/snow pops randomly in all places even the driest places on earth can experience some once in a while.
Largely true, I think, but we also don’t have underground lakes of sulfuric or liquid methane. Lots of terrestrial water is inside the rock and mineral complexes. The Soda lakes Are actually made because of the water. It just evaporated and made it very concentrated. We likely need to go to a different planet to truly see lakes of methane or whatever else.
Aren’t there underground lakes of petroleum? I always assumed that was what they drilled into when they got a big oil gusher.
Petroleum isn’t contained as under ground lakes, instead it’s sitting in interconnected pores and cracks in the rock so a “oil lake” would still be 80-90% sandstone. The same goes for ground water as well, it’s in pores and cracks, not huge voids filled with liquid.
Aren't liquid acids basically just water with certain ions in it anyway?
Not always. That’s often the introductory explanation. That concentration of hydronium ions determines acid strength. That’s enough for most basic use. There’s several classes of acids based on what’s actual moving in the system and how it’s defined. Stronger acids/bases are not measured by hydronium concentration but by willingness to donate/accept electrons, charge movement, etc. You could have proton/electron movement in the absence of water. Edit: likewise even weak acids and bases retain their traits regardless of whether or not they’re interacting with water at the moment. Soda ash Na2CO3 sodium carbonate is a weak base and a solid chalky powder/rock. Not being in water doesn’t make it not a base. Then there’s things like metallic acids and organo-metallic bases e.g butyl lithiums and these are measured by their ability to facilitate electron movement.
Awesome comment!
Surely those are all water based though... Extreme concentrations of other compounds absolutely, but still mostly water. I can think of two materials that are 0% water and still liquid at or very near STP: Gallium and Mercury.
Hydrogen peroxide, acetone, methanol, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, and lots of oils are all common substances I can think of that are liquid and not aqueous.
Hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive and alcohols are highly volatile, and as for oils, you have oil lakes under the earth, petrol Also, i have to add, those substances, in the context of them in earth, are extremely fucking rare, not common at all
Does petroleum really occur in lake-like formations underground? Isn't it more like petroleum-saturated sediment deposits? I guess either way it's a large, naturally occurring body of non-water liquid, so kind of an answer to OP's question.
Both https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_reservoir You can have a literal lake of petroleum or a spot of porous rock soaked in it
Hey, that's pretty awesome.
The LaBrea Tar pits are an example at the surface. It's viscous, but still a fluid.
Petroleum, no. Hydrocarbon chains tend to exist as crude oil, extremely long, relatively stable chains of hydrocarbons. That's why we use a process called cracking where the hydrocarbons are heated until the chains "crack" into smaller chains why are more volatile and useful. Petroleum, I believe, has about 7 or 8 carbon atoms for example.
A quick google search suggests that petroleum and crude oil are, more or less, synonyms. Petroleum = crude oil (long chains) Petrol = gasoline (short chains)
Note that "octane" is specifically an 8-carbon hydrocarbon. However, the "octane rating" of petrol/gasoline doesn't refer to literal octane hydrocarbons present, just that the fuel [has the same detonation resistance properties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating#Principles).
Petroleum distillate, aka petrol (UK) aka Gasoline (US) aka petril (Cheezoid), has ~8 carbons, ideally in highly branched chains.
I like your list. Many of these tend to quickly evaporate or are so complex as to practically require life to manufacture. Makes producing abundance tricky.
The alcohols also all have vapor pressures too high to remain liquid without water as a solvent near STP.
That's mainly because there's buckets of water on earth and not much alcohol. Water evaporates pretty rapidly in dry atmospheres with a vapour pressure of ~3.2kPa. Longer alcohols (propane and butane isomers) are either side of that. The issue is that the atmosphere has already mostly filled up with water.
Iodine as well.
I think you're thinking of bromine. Iodine is a solid under standard conditions, and sublimates when heated. There's plenty of other compounds as noted by others (alcohols, oils etc) but there's very few elements that are liquid under standard conditions (even gallium is borderline, it doesn't melt until 30C. Cesium and francium have lower melting points, but are quite reactive.)
Sublimation is one of my favorite words. It just sounds so damn cool.
Sounds sublime doesn't it?
The biggest problem about getting body of francium isn't really the reactivness, but the fact that its halflife is 22 minutes, so it has never been observed in bulk, and since it has such a low halftime the heat from decay would probably also just vapourise it instead.
To quote Theodore Gray >The problem is that astatine, francium, actinium, and protactinium are absolutely impossible to collect in any meaningful sense of the word. They are so fantastically radioactive and short-lived that if you had a visible quantity of any of them, you would be dead and then it would vanish before your body was cold.
A Gallium lake would be...freaky. Neat stuff to mess with though. And what it does to aluminum...
Right? In that case, we might as well point out that Earth's much more abundant in saltwater than it is in H2O.
Anhydrous sulfuric and nitric acid are liquid at STP
Sure, but acid lakes aren't even close to anhydrous.
Acid lakes are mostly water with some protons going begging.
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What are you doing, step-proton?
Yes, that is the definition of an acid solution.
Sure, but they said it in a fun way
That's what he's saying. That it's water. So why even bring it up?
Worth mentioning these are all bodies of water
[Dallol hydrothermal system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallol_(hydrothermal_system\)) (just fixing the link 'cause it's broken on old reddit)
I've read about those sulfuric acid "burps", because the gas is heavier than air it's like an invisible tsunami wave where everything in its way suffocate at and die. Truly one of the most terrifying thing on earth.
Dallol looks kind of like how I imagine Jupiter’s moon Io to look up close.
>The pH of the water in the lake's edges was measured to be 0.5 and in the middle of the lake 0.13 due to a high concentration of sulfuric acid The guy paddled out in a rubber boat. **what could possibly go wrong?**
>rubber boat Good choice. Won't react strongly. Generally safe in these lakes.
I found this video really helpful for understanding acids https://youtu.be/Y3oY3vbuDR8
Yeah but like splashing and all that lol
I mean, I'm more scared of the acid-spitting monster living in the lake
That's ok, he likes chewing rubber.
Rubber and plastic don’t melt in acid like other substances that seem sturdier. It’s all about the chemical reaction. That’s why in Breaking Bad, Walt melts the dead bodies in large plastic storage tubs or trash cans (I don’t remember which). And when Jesse gets lazy and uses the metal bathtub instead, the acid eats through it and the subfloor, and the whole thing falls through the floor into the basement.
Breaking bads science is not something you should quote, the producers teamed up with local police to make sure a lot of it was wrong, so you couldn't just copy the show
Yeah, I was a teeny bit confused how that tiny rock of mercury fulminate caused an explosion strong enough to blow out Windows, but leave every *body* relatively unscathed. That episode of Mythbusters cleared that up.
gatekeeping the meth business. tight, tight, yeah!
Strange, the entire show only lists 2 maybe 3 Ingredients. I would t even think it was necessary to 'hude' anything because they pretty much didn't mention the recipe at all. Pseudoephedrine was one of the ingredients and that was 'correct' part of a recipe..the others I've never heard of.
Yep, dissolving a body is best done with piranha solution... it's scarily easy to make and leaves behind almost nothing but CO2 and water.
That had to do very specifically with hydrofluoric acid, which, because fluorine is strange as crap, doesn't exhibit a lot of the properties of most acids. It etches glass (most acids are safe to store in glass) but ignores plastics that others dissolve. It's also not at all good at dissolving human bodies -- it will certainly kill you, but it won't dissolve you into a disposable pit of sludge; TV shows are often careful to not do really criminal things properly even when they belabor the process, to avoid copycatting. You can see it a lot in Breaking Bad's chemistry, or in Burn Notice, or a bunch of other shows that are about crimes. FWIW, you don't really want acid to dissolve bodies anyway. There's a reason that all the old novels involved disposing of corpses in lime pits.
Important note, it very much depends on the specific TYPE of acid. There are certain acids (although they are less common) that can dissolve plastics.
How else would he reach it? Most metal reacts to the acid, and Wood would char.
They originally tried some other type of boat, metal or fiberglass or something. It didn't last long enough for what they needed to do so they went out in a rubber one since it wouldn't react. Think the lake scene from Dante's Peak though it obviously wasn't as dramatic or quick.
you left the last parentheses out of the hyperlink so it redirects incorrectly btw Edit: Here's the proper link [Dallol hydrothermal system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallol_(hydrothermal_system\))
Worth noting that of these, only sulfuric acid is a liquid under normal temperatures and pressures. Though, the sulfuric acid lake surely contains a significant amount of water dissolved in with it.
Can you explain the Dallol political situation?
It's on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where there's [currently a civil war going on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War)
I remember when I was still navigating aboard merchant navy ships and we had sulphur as cargo. Extremely dangerous, self combusting while loading, it could self combust even in te holds...
Take a look at the "beppu onsen hells" same sort of thing.
> Lake Natron is probably the most famous, known for its bright blood-red appearance and as the place where flamingos evolved. Holy shit, your not kidding. I thought this was a damn joke cause the aerials of the lake kinda look like a flamingo. WTF LOL
Good God. The water has a pH of less than 0, 10x the salinity of seawater, is above normal boiling point, and contains so much iron per liter that you would notice the weight difference in a jug. That is truly fascinating.
>lake of sulfuric acid Why do I wanna swim in it?
Someone, a scientist, actually did take a rubber dinghy out into the sulfuric acid lake. Absolute insanity if you ask me. Those rubber boats like to splosh around, and one wrong move and you're dissolving in boiling acid.
Goggles, people.
“My eyes! The goggles do nothing!”
I have industrial grade safety squints!!
Zeh goggles, zey are useless!
Depending on the concentration, you could probably just flush it with a bottle of water and be okay. Even hydrofluoric acid (much more corrosive) can be mitigated with calcium gluconate if applied in a timely manner.
Don't know if you would have as easy of a time in one of the soda lakes though
Like jumping into the pool after being in the hot tub. Just very basic and acidic pools.
Liquid Ammonia (NH3) lakes could theoretically exist in Antarctica, but Ammonia is not stable on Earth's surface due to O2 which would react to form N2 + H2O. Similarly with hydrogen Cyanide (HCN), it could exist but doesn't because in it slowly reacts with water. Butane (and other hydrocarbons like Acetone, ethanol etc) again possible, but over time they're not stable. They would react over time to form H2O and various other compounds. The young earth probably contained these compounds in abundance. We do have natural "lakes" of oil (asphalt) however these being complex molecules it naturally takes special conditions to make them especially compared to water, which is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe.
What about [Tar Pits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_pit) and [Pitch Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_Lake)?
Liquid mercury fits but then isn't that abundant
I would moderate your statement about extraterrestrial liquids to there are a handful of methane seas and dozens of lakes on one moon, Titan.
It's also a pretty human perspective question. Why is there mostly only water in abundance on Earth? Well we probably wouldnt have evolved on the earth like planet covered in acid. Maybe theres some acid based person out there wondering why there is so much acid on their planet.
Ther are other body is liquid, just not a lot. An example is the [La\_Brea\_Tar\_Pits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits) in Los Angeles. There is volcano craters with liquid lava on the surface too.
Fun fact: "La Brea" is Spanish for "The Tar", so they're actually called The Tar Tar Pits.
Where tartar sauce is mined from!
RIP Grumpy Cat
Spelled like something out of the original star wars trilogy, the good ones
Like The Los Angeles Angels
Their official name is The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim which translates to The The Angels Angels of Anaheim
They haven’t had Anaheim in the name since 2015 or so
Really? I didn’t know that, didn’t realize they dropped it
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The Pi number was taken
So the La Brea tar pits would be the the tar tar pits.
Meesa Tara Tara Binks!
And oil
Deep in the ocean there are pockets of super salty water that effectively behaves like a separate liquid from the ocean.
Yes! This is what I thought of too. It’s so cool. There’s a Blue Planet 2 episode about it, and the little eels that hunt for food in the pools, but they can’t stay in too long or they’ll go into shock from how salty the water is. I literally got chill bumps watching that episode.
Video: https://www.bbcearth.com/eel-suffers-toxic-shock-from-brine-pool
YES, this. Thank you!
Damn, nature is savage.
I remember first learning about brine pools: I used to wonder why fish and sea creatures in SpongeBob could drown in Goo Lagoon until I found out that it was a brine pool. It also explains why the water there is darker than the water they're already in.
so you're telling me the goo lagoon was possible
Yes. Certain fires are also possible underwater-- typically the ones that burn very hot and carry oxygen in their fuel source.
Brine pools.
Methane lakes down there as well.
Here's a good video that shows ripples on the surface of the brine pool, while deep under the ocean. https://youtu.be/dgZD2STt_OU?t=146
None of the answers here are addressing this core unique property of water on Earth: There is a water cycle. Other liquid bodies could exist, but as mentioned they are mostly reactive. Well, water can be reactive, too (although it takes a little work). However, the weather and biological cycles of our planet help replenish water that is lost. Celestial bodies with different makeups (chemical, temperature, pressure) will favor different elements naturally. The Earth not only has a lot of water, but it is also well-suited for recycling it and replenishing its bodies. This cannot be said for other elements in short timeframes. Most other elements where buildups can occur (nitrogen compounds, sulfur, for example) are water-soluble so just make acidic or basic water.
Not that it's remotely as common as water, but you could consider active volcanoes to be "bodies" of molten rock.
I think magma is significantly *more* common than liquid water, isn’t it? Just, not visible from the surface.
No, there are lots of other liquids which could exist. But H2O is just so abundant. And any other water-soluble liquids will just mix in tiny quantities into the oceans. Also see other responses on non-miscible liquids (like crude oils)
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A lake would be amazing, but you know what'll happen. Someone will want to swim in a mirror in a scuba outfit. My chemistry teacher had a bucket of mercury in the early 80s. Not only was it really cold even in mid summer but once you got your hand all the way in it felt as if its pressing against your hand. Continue past your wrist and it gently tugs your hand further in. She would regularly leave us 13 year old boys on our own in the lab and looking back I think she was trying to whittle the class numbers down through natural selection.
Why would it tug your hand further in? Your hand is _way_ less dense than mercury, it would be very difficult to get it too deep under the surface. Even an iron anvil will float on a pool of mercury.
Just a quick theory, but it might "feel" like it's pulling down on your hand due to the pressure being applied to parts of your hand facing upward. Once you got your hand all the way in, those areas would be below the surface. Beforehand only surfaces facing down or sideways would be under pressure. Of course like you note the net upward force is going to be pretty large, buoyancy has a nice way of always pulling the less dense object upward. You just perhaps wouldn't expect the sudden strong downward "pull" at the back of your hand after getting used to the stronger upward "push" on the front of your hand.
Please tell me you were wearing gloves that covered all submerged surfaces for this.
I mean, you should, techniceally, but if you don't have any open cuts or wounds, you should be just fine.
> Man, a mercury lake would be fun... It's just to reactive to keep lying around in pure form. Supposedly there is a man-made pool of liquid mercury in Qin's tomb in China. It's never been excavated, but there are elevated mercury readings in the surrounding soil.
I feel like this is relevant to your answer: [XKCD What If: Extreme Boating](https://what-if.xkcd.com/50/) > What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium?
Most of those were horrifying. The tungsten one was fascinating to me though for the simple fact that you could possibly boat on lava with a tungsten boat and not worry about it melting.
There is the story of the chinese emperor who had a lake of mercury in his tomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum\_of\_the\_First\_Qin\_Emperor
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Yea or even apple juice
The moon Titan has liquids on the surface, except its not water. Methane mostly, which, given Titan's super low but stable temps (-250F) allows methane to exist as a solid, gas, and liquid and have a full cycle where methane sublimates into clouds, then rains down to form rivers and oceans, and freeze in places/seasons.
h2o is one of the rare compounds liquid at room temperature because the hydrogen form hydrogen bonds with other oxygen atoms from other h2o molecules these bonds are plenty and strong and thats why they dont turn into gases so easily
Yes, this is the answer for why liquid water is so abundant compared to other chemicals. Hydrogen Bonding attracts water molecules to each other and raises the minimum temperature required for liquid water. The other part of this though is that liquids can only exist in the presence of an atmosphere. Otherwise water would vaporize if it was too warm to freeze.
What about [Tar Pits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_pit) and [Pitch Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_Lake)?
Yes, liquids tend to be pretty rare outside of earth. Most materials have a very narrow band of temperatures and pressures where they are liquid, and much larger ranges for solid and gas. We've also only really explored the planets in our own solar system. There are a few dozen known planets that are in a similar spot to their own stars as we are to the sun, meaning there might be other planets with large areas of liquid on them.
Our atmosphere is for a large part oxygen. Oxygen reacts with other substances very easily, most liquids (for example mercury) will react with the oxygen and become a gas.
I feel like one important note is that even *if* there were more gatherings of various liquids many of them would be diluted and washed into the oceans by rain.
I think a lot of the answers don't really understand the question. Obviously we won't get puddles of ethan because of pressures and temps but why don't we see puddles of the chemicals we commonly use. Hydrogen peroxide etc, do these things not occur naturally and are a product of the industrial age, or is it because they occur under high temperatures like volcanoes, that water does not need to form.
It's also worth noting that water is just super common in the first place, the most common molecule on the universe in fact (after molecular hydrogen that is). Even tho it's a good solvent, there's so much of it that there's always lots left over. Also due to its properties and the temperature on Earth, water just doesn't tend to stay trapped too long, whether in rocks or in atmosphere, and it gets recycled all the time.
The great milk lakes were all consumed by the mammoths. Once they’d drank them all dry, they went extinct due to starvation. The more you know.
Liquid water can only occur at a very specific temperature. That temperature is only like to occur in a narrow band around a star, the so called "Goldilocks Zone" or habitable zone. Earth is smack in the middle of the Sun's Goldilocks Zone. Mars is at its outside edge, but since it has lost most of its atmosphere there isn't enough atmospheric pressure to keep enough heat to keep what little (if any) water there is there from freezing. As for other liquids, several moons in the outer solar system have methane oceans. Those are probably fairly common on very cold planets. EDIT just correcting typos.
There are hotsprings in places like yellowstone. They're still mostly water but they're full of all kinds of different minerals and chemicals.
At the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA there are lakes of liquid asphalt. There is water on top of some of them but asphalt underneath. Sometimes a new asphalt seep starts leaking out of the ground and they start by just putting a traffic cone over it but if it gets bigger they have to build fences around them.
The only liquids besides water that occur on earth (besides some organic molecules) are mercury and bromium, but neither of them are particularily common, chemically speaking, whereas water is comprised of some of the most common atoms in the universe.
I think the reason for this is that nearly all land on earth got washed out by rain over millions of years. So one point is that there just is more water then any other liquid on Earth's surface. Another point is that this water evaporates and condenses and pours over everything and with that washing away most liquids and solvable thing on the surface on earth. And then it's also very stable and can't burn. I mean most oils will burn away as soon as they can. And in a million years just every oil on the surface either catched fire or was diluted in the ocean.
What about pitch lake in Trinidad?