Ice Spikes
An unintended lesson in layman physics.
Just the other day I opened up the freezer to grab some fresh ice cubes and noticed something I’d never observed before: a sizable stalactite-like ice spire had grown out of one my ice cubes.
Unwilling to simply let the event pass by as an inexplicable phenomenon, I did a little research. The research proved quite easy, as this occurrence has (apparently) been fairly well documented and studied by the scientific community.
The simple explanation of the event is this: Under the right conditions, the ice-spike grows due to water’s unique property of expanding when frozen.
“Water is one of those rare materials that expands while it freezes. If a crust of ice with a small hole in it forms over liquid water, it can trap the liquid below, leaving it no room to expand during freezing. So, as the water begins to solidify, it is forced up through the hole and begins to freeze around the hole’s edge, forming a hollow, water-filled spike.” (Stephen Morris, PhD [Physics], Scientific American.)
The reason this isn’t seen often in our everyday ice cube trays, is that the proper conditions for ice-spike…
