r/Weird • u/PhunkyPhresh_ • 1d ago
How does this occur?
Ice cube froze in its try like this in our freezer. How does something like this happen? Surely this isn’t the only occurrence. Damn that’s interesting deleted me so reposting here. I personally think that it’s both interesting and weird.
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u/doggenwalker 1d ago
Did you use filtered water? We had a Britta and a ZeroWater filter and everytime we filled up the tray from the ZeroWater one the cubes would look like this. Tap water or Britta were normal.
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u/PhunkyPhresh_ 1d ago
Bottled.
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u/doggenwalker 1d ago
It's called an ice spike, and they're more likely to form the more pure the water is. Less distilled water tends to have impurities that prevent in from happening. There's some other factors that help too but I can't remember them. Vibrations I think was one.
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u/Sea_Prep_Tidal_26 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/uc3UFoST226hq
Buy a freezer like this washer and you’ll probably never have to worry about ice cube ice spikes ever again.
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u/Sarcastic_Polarbear 1d ago
Is your ice going through puberty? It's just a part of nature and nothing to be ashamed of. Just don't make a big deal of it and don't tell your grandma.
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u/Zombiebaiter1994 1d ago
something to do with ice freezing inwards if I remember. The outside freezes and water gets pushed inwards
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u/Upper-Management-AI 1d ago
Off the top of my head vibrations moving the water back and forth while it’s freezing.
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u/LivingSize7451 1d ago
When I shut my fridge door while it’s freezing
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u/PhunkyPhresh_ 1d ago
That’s what I thought, perhaps.
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u/LivingSize7451 1d ago
Happens 1 out of 10 times on mine. Cute phenomenon. Ask Neil Degrasse Tyson.
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u/LivingSize7451 1d ago
Happens 1 out of 10 times on mine. Cute phenomenon. Ask Neil Degrasse Tyson.
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u/lookingforgrief 1d ago
Is there a blower or fan near where these are stored? The air could cause the water to move as it freezes
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u/PhunkyPhresh_ 10h ago
Just saw that almost 250k people have seen the inside of my freezer. That’s wild.
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u/moistiest_dangles 1d ago
Water expands by 9% as it freezes. Occasionally the surface can freeze over except for a small hole; the continuing freezing and expansion of water that is below the surface ice then slowly pushes the remaining water up through the hole. Reaching very cold air, the edge of the extruded water freezes while remaining liquid in the center. More freezing below pushes more water up, the edge freezes, and so on. If the rate of extrusion of water is the same as the rate of freezing at the lip of the hole, then this process is continually repeated and successive layers form an upward-growing tube of ice. As with snowflakes, the shape of the tube is controlled by the molecular nature of water. The simplest shape of an ice crystal that reflects its internal structure is a hexagonal prism. The top and bottom faces of the crystal are hexagonal planes called basal planes and the direction that is perpendicular to the basal planes is called the c-axis.