'MUSEU AGBAR DE LES AIGÜES', WATER ORIGIN OF LIFE

Arriving to the Museu Agbar de les Aigües

Today, The Grandma has visited the Museu Agbar de les Aigües in Cornellà de Llobregat, a city near Barcelona. She has not gone alone because she has accompanied to her closer friend Mayte, who is a great photographer and has taken all the photos that appear on this post.

Last September, Mayte and The Grandma visited Casa Vicens, the first Antoni Gaudí's house built in Barcelona. During their visit, they discovered that there was something that had disappeared from the original structure of this Modernist house, its waterfall.

In 2017, this waterfall was reconstructed inside the Museu Agbar de les Aigües and Mayte and The Grandma have wanted to visit it to homage the greatest Modernist architect of all times and to remember the importance of water in our lives.

During the trip from Barcelona to Cornellà by tram, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Clare West's Treading on Dreams-Stories from Ireland.

The Museu Agbar de les Aigües is a fresh water pumping station and a museum in Cornellà de Llobregat, Barcelona.

The museum is an Anchor point on the European Route of Industrial Heritage.

The plant was designed to raise water from the Llobregat aquifer. The museum interprets water and its properties, the history of water extraction and distribution. On site there is lots of machinery including the 1909 stationary steam engines.

The European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH) is a network, theme route, of the most important industrial heritage sites in Europe. This is a tourism industry information initiative to present a network of industrial heritage sites across Europe. The aim of the project is to create interest for the common European Heritage of the Industrialisation and its legacy.

Contemplating Antoni Gaudí's waterfall

ERIH also wants to promote regions, towns and sites showing the industrial history and market them as visitor attractions in the leisure and tourism industry.

The concept of using a European Route of Industrial Heritage was born in 1999; it was recognised there had be no single event to shape the European landscape greater than the industrial revolution. That changed the working culture of all Europeans, and gave common experiences to communities across Europe whether it be deep mine coal working in the Rühr or South Wales.

Four countries, Great Britain, Belgian, Germany and the Netherlands successfully applied for EU Interreg IIC (North-Western Europe) funding to draw up a master plan. The plan demonstrates the economic potential as a primarily marketing brand. It also shows a possible structure. Its reasoning was that many individual sites had great footfall others had a very low profile. They used the analogy of small shops gathering together in large shopping centres for joint promotion. In the language of EU proposals the hubs are called anchor points; these could be cities or existing industrial sites with a developed tourism infrastructure.

With the plan adopted its implementation was funded by Interreg IIIB-north-western Europe, and the scheme rolled out; starting in the northwest and progressing south and east.

ERIH is a registered association under German law. When funding ran out there were 850 member attractions which has risen to 1,850 sites across the EU28 countries.

In October 2014 further funding was obtained from the EU Creative Europe progamme. The European Route of Industrial Heritage has been a Cultural Route of the Council of Europe since 2019.

More information: Museu Agbar de les Aigües-Fundació Agbar

Water is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere, and the fluids of most living organisms.

It is vital for all known forms of life, even though it provides no calories or organic nutrients. Its chemical formula is H2O, meaning that each of its molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, connected by covalent bonds.

Water is the name of the liquid state of H2O at standard ambient temperature and pressure. It forms precipitation in the form of rain and aerosols in the form of fog. Clouds are formed from suspended droplets of water and ice, its solid state. When finely divided, crystalline ice may precipitate in the form of snow. The gaseous state of water is steam or water vapor.

Mayte visits the Museu Agbar de les Aigües

Water moves continually through the water cycle of evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, and runoff, usually reaching the sea.

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface, mostly in seas and oceans. Small portions of water occur as groundwater (1.7%), in the glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland (1.7%), and in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of ice and liquid water suspended in air), and precipitation (0.001%).

Water plays an important role in the world economy. Approximately 70% of the freshwater used by humans goes to agriculture. Fishing in salt and fresh water bodies is a major source of food for many parts of the world. Much of long-distance trade of commodities, such as oil and natural gas, and manufactured products is transported by boats through seas, rivers, lakes, and canals. Large quantities of water, ice, and steam are used for cooling and heating, in industry and homes.

Water is an excellent solvent for a wide variety of substances both mineral and organic; as such it is widely used in industrial processes, and in cooking and washing.

Water, ice and snow are also central to many sports and other forms of entertainment, such as swimming, pleasure boating, boat racing, surfing, sport fishing, diving, ice skating and skiing.

More information: Casa Vicens

Water (H2O) is a polar inorganic compound that is at room temperature a tasteless and odorless liquid, nearly colorless with a hint of blue. This simplest hydrogen chalcogenide is by far the most studied chemical compound and is described as the universal solvent for its ability to dissolve many substances. This allows it to be the solvent of life. It is the only common substance to exist as a solid, liquid, and gas in normal terrestrial conditions.

Water is a liquid at the temperatures and pressures that are most adequate for life. Specifically, at a standard pressure of 1 atm, water is a liquid between 0 and 100 °C. Increasing the pressure slightly (−8 °F) at 2100 atm. This effect is relevant, for example, to ice skating, to the buried lakes of Antarctica, and to the movement of glaciers. At pressures higher than 2100 atm the melting point rapidly increases again, and ice takes several exotic forms that do not exist at lower pressures.

Increasing the pressure has a more dramatic effect on the boiling point, that is about 374 °C at 220 atm. This effect is important in, among other things, deep-sea hydrothermal vents and geysers, pressure cooking, and steam engine design. At the top of Mount Everest, where the atmospheric pressure is about 0.34 atm, water boils at 68 °C.

Mayte visits the Museu Agbar de les Aigües

At very low pressures, below about 0.006 atm, water cannot exist in the liquid state and passes directly from solid to gas by sublimation -a phenomenon exploited in the freeze drying of food. At very high pressures above 221 atm, the liquid and gas states are no longer distinguishable, a state called supercritical steam.

Water also differs from most liquids in that it becomes less dense as it freezes. The maximum density of water in its liquid form at 1 atm is 1,000 kg/m3; that occurs at 3.98 °C. The density of ice is 917 kg/m3. Thus, water expands 9% in volume as it freezes, which accounts for the fact that ice floats on liquid water.

The details of the exact chemical nature of liquid water are not well understood; some theories suggest that the unusual behaviour of water is due to the existence of 2 liquid states.

Pure water is usually described as tasteless and odorless, although humans have specific sensors that can feel the presence of water in their mouths, and frogs are known to be able to smell it. However, water from ordinary sources -including bottled mineral water- usually has many dissolved substances, that may give it varying tastes and odors. Humans and other animals have developed senses that enable them to evaluate the potability of water by avoiding water that is too salty or putrid.

More information: How Stuff Works

The apparent color of natural bodies of water -and swimming pools- is often determined more by dissolved and suspended solids, or by reflection of the sky, than by water itself.

Light in the visible electromagnetic spectrum can traverse a couple meters of pure water or ice without significant absorption, so that it looks transparent and colorless. Thus aquatic plants, algae, and other photosynthetic organisms can live in water up to hundreds of meters deep, because sunlight can reach them. Water vapour is essentially invisible as a gas.

Through a thickness of 10 meters or more, however, the intrinsic color of water or ice is visibly turquoise, greenish-blue. Its absorption spectrum has a sharp minimum at a violet-blue color of light, 1/227 m−1 at 418 nm. The lower, but still significant, absorption of longer wavelengths makes the perceived colour to be nearer to a turquoise shade. The color becomes increasingly stronger and darker with increasing thickness. Practically no sunlight reaches the parts of the oceans below 1,000 of depth. Infrared and ultraviolet light, on the other hand, is strongly absorbed by water.

The Grandma visits Museu Agbar de les Aigües

The refraction index of liquid water (1.333 at 20 °C) is much higher than that of air (1.0), similar to those of alkanes and ethanol, but lower than those of glycerol (1.473), benzene (1.501), carbon disulfide (1.627), and common types of glass (1.4 to 1.6). The refraction index of ice (1.31) is lower than that of liquid water.

Since the water molecule is not linear and the oxygen atom has a higher electronegativity than hydrogen atoms, it is a polar molecule, with an electrical dipole moment: the oxygen atom carries a slight negative charge, whereas the hydrogen atoms are slightly positive.

Water is a good polar solvent, that dissolves many salts and hydrophilic organic molecules such as sugars and simple alcohols such as ethanol.

Water also dissolves many gases, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide -the latter giving the fizz of carbonated beverages, sparkling wines and beers. In addition, many substances in living organisms, such as proteins, DNA and polysaccharides, are dissolved in water. The interactions between water and the subunits of these biomacromolecules shape protein folding, DNA base pairing, and other phenomena crucial to life, hydrophobic effect.

 More information: Smithsonian

Pure water has a low electrical conductivity, which increases with the dissolution of a small amount of ionic material such as common salt.

Liquid water can be split into the elements hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electric current through it -a process called electrolysis. The decomposition requires more energy input than the heat released by the inverse process, 285.8 kJ/mol.

Liquid water can be assumed to be incompressible for most purposes: its compressibility ranges from 4.4 to 5.1×10−10 Pa−1 in ordinary conditions. Even in oceans at 4 km depth, where the pressure is 400 atm, water suffers only a 1.8% decrease in volume.

The viscosity of water is about 10−3 Pa·s or 0.01 poise at 20 °C, and the speed of sound in liquid water ranges between 1,400 and 1,540 meters per second depending on temperature. Sound travels long distances in water with little attenuation, especially at low frequencies -roughly 0.03 dB/km for 1 kHz-, a property that is exploited by cetaceans and humans for communication and environment sensing (sonar).

Metallic elements which are more electropositive than hydrogen, particularly the alkali metals and alkaline earth metals such as lithium, sodium, calcium, potassium and caesium displace hydrogen from water, forming hydroxides and releasing hydrogen. At high temperatures, carbon reacts with steam to form carbon monoxide.

More information: National Geographic

Water is the softest of all things, yet it is the most powerful.

The ocean patiently allows all things to flow into it.

It is always flexible.

Wayne Dyer