Water’s peculiar behaviour has a major effect on Earth’s ecosystem because, without it, large bodies of water would likely freeze completely during winters with drastic cooling.
It has not been entirely clear why exactly water defied such an obvious trend in nature to densify upon cooling and instead behaved completely counterintuitively.
New research, performed by two researchers at University of Buffalo - Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, aims to finally put the matter to rest by developing a model based on a fundamental theory of liquid and solid-state properties for substances. The new model not only predicts that water, but other substances such as silicon and liquid sodium would display expansion upon cooling.
According to the article the model predicts water behaves the way it does due to "an interplay of several fundamental processes at the atomic scale as they organize into locally favored clusters that have higher density, and more loosely packed structures with larger thermal fluctuations around."
