- #1
jfislove
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Homework Statement
A 4.50 kg block of ice at 0 C falls into the ocean and melts. The average temperature of the ocean is 3.50 C, including all the deep water. By how much does the melting of this ice change the entropy of the world?
Homework Equations
Not sure if I should be using any equations as such, I've just been multiplying known values to get the energy, temperature and mass of the water and ice.
The Attempt at a Solution
I googled the mass of all water in the Earth's oceans, and got a figure of 7.61x10^23 kg, so I multiplied the specific heat capacity of water (4190 J/kg.K) by this mass to try and get the entropy of all the water, so I got 3.19x10^23 J/K.
I then got the entropy of the ice block by multiplying the latent heat of fusion of ice (3.34x10^5 J/kg) by the mass of the block and dividing it by the absolute temperature of the ice (273.15 K), giving what I thought was the entropy of the block to be 5502.47 J/K.
Obviously, because the two numbers are on completely different scales, adding/subtracting them makes almost no difference to the answer, so I've really no idea how to handle the question from here on!
All help is appreciated!