Conveniently, water is the only common substance on Earth that is naturally found as a solid, liquid and gas. ❄️🌊☁️ We could technically say that Earths primary material is water because the temperature here and conditions allow it to exist effortlessly in all three forms, often at the same time. But what about other planets, so we don't always think from our point of view? Uranus, for example, doesn't have anything solid on its surface. Let's imagine a solar system far away that has higher temperatures than ours. Let's say that there’s a planet where silica exists in liquid, solid and gas; that is their kind of water. A tricky situation but still manageable. Their type of snow is what we on Earth would call sand. And the winter weather forecast would be below 400°C. 🪐🚀🥵 We tend to classifying water as a substance in its own category, but theoretically, it could also be a rock-type, just like marble or quartzite that are rock-types made out of one compound. The rivers of water would be like the lava rivers, like we have seen on Reykjanes only the difference is that the freezing point for that is around 400-500°C while the freezing point for water is 0°C, the temperature mark where the liquid turns into solid. 🌊🌋 Here we easily turn water into stone at 0°C. Ice is nothing other than crystals where the chemical formula is H2O, similar to crystals that we see in lava where the chemical formula is perhaps Mg2SiO4, only the main difference is the temperature they form. We even have water as a metamorphic rock, called glacier ice. ❄️🪨 These snowflakes here, have formed these skeletal structures, which is a state of shock. Formed quickly in conditions they don't like. They’re in a fragile state where they could melt with minor changes in the environment. This could, therefore, be pictures of an unhappy crystal formed in a magma chamber below a volcano, where unusual conditions are, and crystals are often out of their comfort zone. So, the same processes are happening with the snowflake on our surface and the crystal in the magma chamber, only different formulas that do the same things under different temperatures. ❄️💎 ©Copyright - geology_with_helga