What temperature does sea water freeze at?
Seawater actually freezes in stages. In the first stage that occurs around -2C, the ice is made up of freshwater water making the water around it have higher salinity. There are areas of trapped brine in the ice which will not completely freeze until 0F. This was basically where the farhenheit scale comes from since this was the temperature that Mr. Farhenheit found was needed to get a solution of very concentrated salt solution(ammonium chloride) to freeze. So perhaps it is not gcnp58’s knowledge that is the problem here, perhaps it is your lack of a properly defining what you mean by freezing.
Beren gave a good answer. If you take a sample of water at 25 C and measure the reorientation time with magnetic resonance, you will find evidence for short lived ice crystals. Try measuring the pair correlation function with x-ray diffraction and you will find a small O-O feature corresponding to the lattice constant for hexagonal ice crystals. With neutron scattering, you will find evidence of H-bonding (and a lot of incoherent scattering unless you use D2O). Measure the infrared spectrum of water at 25 C at high resolution and then do a Fourier deconvolution of the peaks near 3500 cm-1 and you will find features (in order of decreasing frequency) monomer, dimer, trimer, ..etc. Conversely, if the same measurements are made at -25 C, there is evidence for disordered “free” H2O molecules. Freezing is a construct of 19th century science and does not adequately describe the complexity of the underlying molecular physics. Freezing loosely describes the fraction of bound ordered molecules.
I may be going ‘out on a limb’ slightly since I am only going on my recollection of the science, and my memory is not what it used to be. My understanding is that when Fahrenheit first invented the thermometer, he realized that pure water froze at a much higher temperature than water which had dissolved impurities. He decided to use common salt, (sodium chloride) to establish a zero reference point and had then graduated his scale to the boiling point of water which he decided to be 212 degrees. I suspect that Fahrenheit was attempting to correlate his temperature scale to existing weight measurements of the time where a ‘hundred weight’ was 112 pounds. Sea water will freeze much closer to( 0F) than anything else. Also, gcnp58 does not seem to be able to understand your question, or have enough knowledge to respond sensibly to your question. I am afraid that science, scientific ability and standards have nothing to do with peoples ‘beliefs’, these people will continue to believe whatev
