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Re: Super Cold Beer!

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Chuck Britton wrote:

the liquid/air interface. As I watched (seemed like a few seconds)
the spot grew and soon the entire bottle of beer was frozen into a
'slushy'!

I heard about something similar during a NPR SCIENCE FRIDAY show. They
were interviewing a researcher at (I think) U. Mass Boston who had just
published a paper in Nature about water having two liquid phases. At one
point they were supercooling water down to -30C. The researcher mentioned
that certain types of spring water are known to do this: they remain
liquid in the freezer, then when you pick up the bottle it "magically"
freezes before your eyes.

I tried reproducing this with bottled spring water in the freezer, but it
just froze normally. If I try it again, maybe I'll wrap the bottle in a
towel so that the cold objects in the freezer don't trigger any early
crystallization. The towel would also keep the blower from chilling one
side of the bottle too fast.

I wonder if the -30C temperature of supercooled water is low enough that
the water doesn't heat itself above 0C as it crystallizes. I mean, as ice
crystals grow they heat both themselves and the water in contact with the
growing surface. If the water wasn't supercooled enough, then the
"triggered" ice would only grow to a certain size, then halt, since the
remaining water in the bottle would have been warmed up to 0C.


Always gotta mention Kurt Vonnegut's "Ice Nine". If such a phase existed,
then liquid water is supercooled right now, and all we need is a single
seed crystal in order to freeze the world. However, "Ice Nine" was
supposed to melt at 140C. Would the oceans freeze, or would the water
heat up to 140C and halt the advancing wave of crystallization? Maybe the
Earth's environment would stablize and there would be small 140C oceans
remaining, with thermophillic bacteria left to re-start evolution.


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