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Yes, I've been educated beyond my intelligence : -)

Yes, very easily. That 100s of tonnes of ice is a mere speck in a huge ocean.

What did it tell your friend, Gerdundula?? (and yes that is a stupid name for anything subteranean).
I had a friend called 'Chosun Cate Kim the under water Cowboy', big into Status Quo, if my memory serves me correctly.

mutanthalibut wrote:
> What did it tell your friend, Gerdundula?? (and yes that is a
> stupid name for anything subteranean).

'Submarine', surely?
Well done for spotting the SQ allusion : -)

"in freezing cold water I am surprised a massive block of ice that would weigh thousand of tons and his hundreds of metres by hundreds of metres cubed, would just melt away"


I hate being pedantic, but if the water was freezing cold it wouldn't be water.

To be really, really pedantic fresh water, at sea-level air pressure only starts to freeze at 0˚C. For water to become fully solid (ice) the temperature would have to be constantly <0˚C.

Salt water, on the other hand, freezes around -2˚C. At least the Atlantic does because it's salinity is higher than the other oceans. I can't remember what the salt does to lower the freezing point. I think it's something to do with the sodium making it harder for the Oxygen and Hydrogen to bond, or something.

So, you can easily have freezing cold water without it err....freezing!

A good explanantion; more or less why [wholly freshwater- the salt is
'squeezed-out' during gelification] icebergs float on saltwater;
simply, they have relatively lower density than the surroundng fluid.

The 'sodium' thing is due largely to concentration-gradients during
the freezing-process.

Yeah, ice is less dense, but that's nothing to do with the salt being squeezed out because ice floats on fresh water too. It's because the formation of ice crystals make the water molecules expand (so for the same amount of space ice weighs less).

Which leads me to why salt water has a lower freezing point (I googled). It's because as water gets colder (<4˚C) the hydrogen atoms that bond water molecules adjust to keep the negatively charged oxygen atoms apart, which forms crystal latices. When these crystals are fully formed it's called ice.

Sodium makes the hydrogen atoms' job harder and so it takes a colder temperature for the crystals to start forming.

Not that any of this information would have helped those on the Titanic !happy!