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  • Somewhere inside of every raindrop

  • is a tiny impurity. A touch of salt

  • a grain of clay did absolutely crucial to the raindrops existence

  • In fact, without these microscopic pieces of dirt there would be no rain because

  • water vapor can't condense into droplets on its own,

  • which is kind of weird because water molecules like each other

  • If they didn't, they wouldn't cling to each other like this. And in the air

  • vaporized water molecules collide and stick together all the time

  • But they also break apart all the time thanks to bond breaking heat energy

  • Only when air cools down past a certain point called the dew point

  • does this breaking apart slow down enough for little clusters of water

  • molecules to grow into droplets

  • But actually that's only true if the cluster is big

  • to start with. If it's too small, it's surface is curve

  • the molecules on the outside have few neighbors to bond to, which makes them

  • easy to break off

  • So the cluster as a whole has higher chances are losing molecules than gaining them

  • even below dewpoint, which means that up until a certain critical size

  • a cluster chances of shrinking are better than it's odds of growing

  • Unfortunately that critical size is 150 million molecules

  • And while there are millions of 5 molecule clusters in a golf ball sized volume of air to dewpoint

  • odds are that only one of those clusters will grow to a size of 10

  • and you'd need a golf ball of air ten million miles across to find a

  • single fifty molecule cluster

  • which basically means that clusters of water molecules never get to that 150 million mark on their own.

  • Fortunately they don't have to, they can start

  • of it that critical size by condensing onto one of the good Jillians of little pieces of little dirt

  • floating in our atmosphere, and then grow and grow until their are droplet in a rain cloud

  • and ultimately if these little pieces of dirt surrounded by water

  • that make life possible on our big piece of dirt surrounded by water

  • Hi again before I go I wanna let you know that this video was sponsored by Lynda.com

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Somewhere inside of every raindrop

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