 Hi, I'm Ethan Allen. I'm a host of likable science on Think Tech Hawaii, and I'm here to do a little science demonstration and hopefully teach you a little science. So you may have seen this. It's a fairly simple little demonstration, nice and easy to do. I take a balloon, standard, everyday toy balloon, a source of flame, and I bring the balloon down onto the source of flame, and what happens? Boom! The balloon pops. Pretty obvious. Now, I take the same kind of balloon, and I have some water in it. I lower it onto the flame, and notice the flame just burns and burns against the skin of the balloon, and nothing happens. I can hold it here for quite a long while, and nothing will happen. You can see this balloon already has had a good deal of flame. It's blackened up on the bottom a good deal, and it doesn't seem to pop. So what's going on here? Why is the balloon not popping? So if you think about it, the balloon pops from a flame, when you put air in it, is the skin heats up and melts, and then the air under pressure blows out, at least in deflighting the balloon. When you have water in the balloon, the water removes the heat very effectively from the skin of the balloon. So the bottom of it, even where the flame has been on it, is not actually heating up that much. It never heats up to the point where it melts, unless the balloon never pops. This is a testament to the amazing heat capacity of water. There's virtually no other substance on Earth, the very few exceptions, that will hold that much heat, and move heat away that effectively. You may think this is just a little curious phenomenon, but this demonstration shows something very profound about our planet. The Sun, if you think of the flame here as being the Sun, heats up our oceans all around our planet, particularly in equatorial regions, continually day in, day out, every day, shining on them, pouring heat into the oceans. And what happens? The oceans warm up a little bit, but they transport a lot of that heat. They circulate, move that heat out, away from the equators to the poles, dumping that heat out, spreading the heat around our planet, making much more of this planet much more habitable than it would otherwise be. If it weren't for this amazing heat capacity of water, our planet would have a very narrow, very hot zone on the tropics, a tiny little temperate zone, and much of the planet would then be essentially covered in ice and uninhabitable. But thanks to this amazing heat capacity that water has, our planet is more or less temperate, more or less over much of the surface of the planet. That's it. Quick and simple. Hope you enjoyed it.