this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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It's actually not a bad question, just one people don't really think about. Why does room temperature water ~~sublimate~~ evaporate?
It's because the temperature is an average, and some molecules at the surface have enough energy to break their polar bonds.
Water doesn't sublimate. Sublimation is solid to gaseous phase change.
Fixed
sublimation is poorly defined in our context.
Technically, water does sublimate, just not at normal earth pressures. Below 0.6 kPa it transitions straight from solid to gas.
Yeah, evaporate would be the appropriate word here, while sublimate would be for room temperature ice, which I don't know if it is ice that does it or if there is a microscopic film of water that then evaporates.
Pretty sure Bill Nye taught me this. Substitute teachers aren't playing the good stuff anymore
I wanna say Bill Nye had a little contraption that explained this phenomenon. A cup with a piston on one end that vibrated. The top part of the cup had a ring in the center where little balls in the cup could fit. The piston represented the temperature (energy). Even at a lower temperature, some balls could randomly fly into the little hole and into the other partition. Turning the temperature up (increasing the speed and power of the piston) made more balls more frequently "evaporate." I wish I could find that demonstration again.
Maybe you just gotta piston pound your balls for yourself, comrade.