Greentext

Enter vapor pressure:

Basically water always evaporates if the air is completely dry, until the air contains a certain amount of water (measured in partial pressure, which is the part of the air pressure that is caused by water vapor). This partial pressure is temperature-dependent, so if you have 20°C (normal room temperature) you're gonna have 23 mbar of water vapor partial pressure in the air. Source

So water still evaporates at lower temperatures when the air is dry enough. It's just that at 100°C ("boiling point of water"), that partial pressure of water vapor in the air increases to 1013 mbar which is equal to the total pressure of the air; In other words, at that temperature in equilibrium, the air is totally made up of water vapor and nothing else. If you increase the temperature above that, the water vapor partial pressure tries to still increase, which makes the total pressure go above normal air pressure, which causes a pressure gradient and causes the air to move with mechanical force, which you can use to make turbines spin.

For fun I'm going to explain why. So air can hold some amount of water in it at any temperature. Water energy in form of heat is not evenly distributed so some molecules move faster than others, at the surface some move fast enough to escape the water and into the air. That's called evaporation, boiling does however require 100°C.

This also explains why humid weather affects evaporation (lower capacity to hold water in air) and at high humidity there's an a similar chance of water being deposited to the body of water as water escaping which affects evaporation speed a lot.

Honestly, I really like this quality of water, it would be super annoying to deal with otherwise.

It's interesting because very pure water without asperites can be heated above 100c at standard pressure at sea level without boiling. But once impurities are added to it it starts boiling vigorously!

Anon didn't pay attention in physics class.

Water operates on Celsius so it only needed to be 100 degrees retard

The teacher was explaining about conducting and not conducting, and we had a battery with lamp thing to test on various objects. I of course had to test this on a pencil and discovered semi-conducting. That was a serious "not today" sigh from the teacher.

this feels like a potentially sincere attempt to recruit people into an anti-science conspiracy movement - this doesn't really feel different than the kind of reasoning you see with moon landing denialists or flat earthers.

matter changes state based on temperature

This is a gross oversimplification and your experiment proves that :)

Water doesn't need to boil to dry out.

Obviously it's just losing wetness over time.

I had this question in a mid-term in physical chemistry 20 years ago. I can't remember the details but it is driven by the entropy in the system. Along with the things other have said about changes tight above the surface of the puffle.

Anon forgot that temperature in a substance is not uniform. This normally doesn't matter, but if a part becomes hotter than the boiling point it will leave before it has a chance to go back to average temperature. So yes, the water "went to 212" before evaporating.