The Grotthuss Mechanism

If you could watch an individual water molecule, once in a while you’d see it do this.

As it bounces around, every so often it hits another water molecule hard enough enough for one to steal a hydrogen nucleus—that is, a proton—from the other!

The water molecule with the missing proton is called a hydroxide ion, OH⁻. The one with an extra proton is called a hydronium ion, H₃O⁺.

This process is called the ‘autoionization’ of water. Thanks to this, a few molecules in a glass of water are ac...