Tuesday, May 31, 2011

v42.1: Stalagmites in my Freezer

Howdy folks,

-slurp-

Today was much like any other day.  I got up, got ready for work and headed into the office.  I worked.  I came home, ran a few errands, came home again and decided to have a glass of Pepsi.  I opened the freezer door and stopped.  I couldn't help but notice all my ice cubes in my ice cube tray had little ice spikes sticking out of them.  It was the oddest thing and initially I thought something was wrong.  Why the hell would my ice cubes have stalagmites sticking out of them?

-slurp-

Of course I had to look this up and apparently it isn't uncommon to see ice cubes with stalagmites sticking out of them.  I bet you're all wondering how this is achieved?  I examined the ice cubes for a few minutes, but I couldn't figure out exactly how it happened.  Did someone break into my apartment and fashion these out of ice?  Was there water dripping down from inside the freezer in precisely the exact spot where my ice cubes were?  Are there microscopic organisms living in my freezer who can only survive in sub zero temperatures and they build these structures to live in?

-slurp-

After a quick search on Goggle, the answer finally presented itself to me.  This strange phenomenon happens to ice cubes when they freeze from the outside in.  Since water expands when it freezes, there is no where for the liquid to go - but up - when the ice starts to form.  Seems so simple doesn't it?

-slurp-

On the gaming side of things I've started playing WoW again.  This time I've decided to start up a little Blog to record some of the adventures and to just talk geek about WoW.  Initially I had the domain wowgeek.com registered, but I let that domain expire and go away, so I've decided to use my old domain fiendz.net to house the new blog.  If you head over to http://www.fiendz.net you can check it out.  I don't have any content there right now, but I'm slowly building the site up and plan on doing some posting there soon.

-slurp-

Anyway folks, time to head out for now.  I hope everyone had a great day today!

Cheers,

Al

3 comments:

  1. So.... what decides if an ice cube is going to freeze from the outside in vs the inside out? Just curious.
    This has happened to me on a few occasions as well, i just didn't care. hahahahahahahahhaha
    Love you! Hope everything is going well with you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've never had this happen to me. WTH
    Do you have an answer to Dawns question? I'm curious too. Interesting though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Clearly if the ice cube freezes from the inside out, it will expand the water outwards creating (in theory) a bowl shaped ice cube which can be filled with rum :)

    ReplyDelete