Hydrates

This app was developed to educate students from middle school through graduate school on gas hydrates, which is loosely referred to as "ice that burns". Two ice-like blocks are placed on a laboratory bench in the virtual environment. One is ordinary ice. In contrast, the other looks like dirty snow, but it is one of the strangest substances on earth. It is a methane hydrate, which looks like ice, but contains natural gas trapped in cages.

The teacher brings a burner to both of them. The ice simply melts, whereas the hydrate catches and keeps burning while melting. The hydrate burns because the methane coming out of the cages continues to sustain the fire.

SURPRISING FACT

Both ice-like blocks leave behind about the same amount of water of melting. One cubic meter of hydrate yields roughly 0.8 cubic meters of water, but also about 164 cubic meters of methane gas. The water is roughly the same size as the block, but the gas inside it is 164 times larger.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• What is a gas hydrate?
• How does a gas hydrate cage look at the scale of atoms?
• Why hydrates need both cold temperatures and high pressures to stay stable?
• Why hydrates burn but ice does not?
• Where hydrates occur in real life?
• Why hydrates matter?

HOW APP WORKS

• A 7-minute demonstration in 22 short modules
• Users can jump to any module, pause anywhere, and replay anytime
• Can pick up the molecular cage model, rotate & resize it
• Live readouts of volume of water and methane released