Supercooled Water

[Melbosa]

Source: http://f0rked.com/articles/supercooling

(December 8th, 2005) Yesterday morning I went to get some bottled water from my garage. It had been in the garage for over a week, mostly undisturbed. The outside temperature was reportedly -17?C (about 1?F); I imagine the garage was slightly warmer than that, but still below the freezing point of water. I picked up a bottle of water and noticed that it was not frozen. In fact, it was completely liquid. But soon after I disturbed it, the water in the bottle began to crystalize. The water became progressively cloudy from the top down as it froze inside the bottle. The effect was much like the ice creeping along the walls and floors in The Day After Tomorrow.



Unfortunately, I was unable to capture the action yesterday. With hopes of reproducing the phenomenon, I thawed a few of the bottles and put them out again last night. This morning it was slightly warmer (about -7?C), but I was pleased to find that several of the bottles of water were still in the liquid state. I managed to capture three videos of reasonable quality of the water turning to ice.

The videos are sweet.  Interesting effect.

[Lazybones]

Neat.. on a related note, do not microwave "pure" or "distilled" water.. You will get super heating, which can cause an explosion of steam when it is disturbed.

[Cova]

you can super-heat regular tap water in a microwave too.  If you boil water a few times in a microwave and let it cool between, you can use up all of the dissolved gasses and such that make water boil easily - resulting in about the same thing that you get with distilled water.  So - if you boiled some water for tea/coffee or whatever, and forgot about it and re-heat it again, if it's not bubbling it may be super-heated.

[Thorin]

That is really cool.  I want to go out and try it now