Water vapour isn’t really applicable here, unless you’re talking about very low pressures. Although you could consider it a component in a mixed gas, it’s not really gaseous water. The true gaseous form of water is steam. Water vapour is more like water that has been dissolved in the atmosphere.
By analogy: sugar is solid at room temperature. But you can dissolve it in water. Have you converted the sugar into a liquid? No. Because sugar is a liquid only at temperatures above 160°C. But the resulting mixture is liquid.
Sort of. The triple point doesn’t really exist at standard atmospheric pressure. The true triple point is somewhere around 600Pa pressure – or a out 0.6% of atmospheric pressure. You can achieve this in the upper atmosphere, on Mars, or in a vacuum chamber where you pull the pressure down to that point.
There is such a thing as vapour pressure in our atmosphere which is different than the triple point. You see this as humidity. But this isn’t truly gaseous water – rather it is more akin to liquid water molecules held in a gaseous solution (the atmosphere being the solvent).
I have a distinct memory of driving past a house like that repeatedly as a kid, but that was decades ago now. Tried searching for it now and cannot find it. I suspect it suffered a similar fate. Can’t find any photos or references to it online though, so maybe I imagined it…
This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.
But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.
In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.
Only in a 2D world with the directions being limited to “up” and “down”. Carrying it laterally around the circumference of the hill would be equally probable.