Everyone knows that ice is colder than water,
but usually, you're not going to freeze water
just by adding some ice cubes.
Today, we're going to see if we can supercool our ice
to the point where it'll actually freeze water solid.
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Today, we're doing a fun experiment using liquid nitrogen, ice, and water.
Three different levels of temperature here,
and we're going to see if we can take some regular cubed ice,
put it in liquid nitrogen until it's absurdly cold,
and then drop it into water.
We're trying to see if we can make the water hit sort of flashpoint,
but in reverse.
Where it will just suddenly freeze,
because we've dropped the temperature so much.
Normally, if you put ice into water,
you're just going to get cold water.
We want to see if we can make the ice so much colder than water
that the water will actually freeze
in the process of trying to warm the ice up.
Here's the basic idea.
We've got some liquid nitrogen.
We've got a bunch of ice cubes and some water.
We're going to dip the ice into liquid nitrogen,
cooling it down way more than a normal freezer would,
and then we'll see if that supercooled ice
can steal enough heat out of water for it to freeze.
We have a number of stemware cups,
and we're using this type because I think it might have
less glass in contact with the water heating it back up.
A lot of the time,
a glass cup will have a sort of thick bottom to it,
and that seems like it would just hold enough heat
that it would just keep our water from freezing.
So I'm hoping that the stemware will have a little bit less of that.
We'll see if it works.
To start off as sort of control test,
we're going to pour some water into a cup,
measure the temperature, and then add a bunch of ice,
and see what temperature drops it down to.
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This water is chilled.
I've had it in the fridge for a while,
but I don't think it's anywhere near freezing.
It's a 9.2 - 8.9 degrees Celsius.
Let's add some ice into our cup.
See what change we get.
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Getting some nice condensation on the outside of the glass,
always a good sign that things
are cooling down.
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It's only been a minute or so,
but let's see what temperature were clocking in at.
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We're already several degrees cooler than where we were before.
37 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dropping still a little bit.
Let's give that another minute of stirring and see where we get.
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All right.
Down to 34 Fahrenheit or 1.1 Celsius,
so that's pretty cold.
That's getting very close to the temperature
of the phase shift between liquid and solid water.
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Mmm, chilly.
Yeah, that was fairly cold, at least in terms of food we eat,
and temperatures we regularly experience.
But over here, we've got liquid nitrogen,
which of course is a whole different beast,
and doesn't really even register to us on just how cold it is.
For instance, I'm not going to put the thermometer in the liquid nitrogen.
That's far too cold.
I'm just going to put it in the vapors between the surface of the liquid
and the top of the container.
And we're below zero Fahrenheit by a lot,
and we're approaching some of the coldest
temperatures ever experienced by anyone on Earth,
and at that point, we have gotten so cold
that our thermometer can no longer handle it.
Somewhere around 60 degrees below zero fahrenheit.
It's too cold, and like I said, this is not in the liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen is still down there below a little bit.
So now, we're going to take some ice,
and we're going to super cool it in our liquid nitrogen,
and then see what happens when we introduce it to our water.
All right, we've stopped bubbling,
which means we probably have our ice cube down to this temperature,
or very close to the temperature of the liquid nitrogen itself.
Just gonna set this on the counter,
try and put our temperature probe in contact with it.
Zero Fahrenheit.
That's a negative 18 Celsius.
There were at a, we're about 50 degrees below Fahrenheit,
and about 45 degrees below Celsius.
I think it's actually far colder than that.
But because the probe is just resting on it,
it's still getting exposure to the air around us.
It's not going to drop all the way down to the temperature of the ice.
But now, let's see what happens if we take some water
and several supercooled ice cubes,
and see what we can do to the temperature of the water.
That's about where our water is, 48 degrees Fahrenheit.
Layer of ice just forms around the tongs so fast
because they're almost as cold as liquid nitrogen itself.
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Our single supercooled ice cube
has only reduced the temperature of our cup of water by about 3 degrees.
But let's try adding several of them.
We had a handful before when you tried normal ice.
I'm curious to see if we can get a handful of supercooled ice cubes.
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Liquid nitrogen is just boiling away.
Our ice is so hot, it's causing our liquid nitrogen to boil.
Looks like we have frozen our ice cubes.
Water is starting off at about 45 and 1/2 Fahrenheit.
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Our super cold ice cubes, they hit the water,
and the water just forms a frozen barrier around them,
almost immediately,
and that happened enough that all of our ice cubes have now stuck together.
Got the temperature down to 35 and 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit.
I think what we're seeing now...
I was hoping that we could sort of cool the water down
to where it was almost at a point when just another little bit of cold
supercooled ice would drop in, and that would sort of
cause the whole cup to freeze.
Mostly, what we're having happen
is as I drop a piece of supercooled ice in,
it forms a layer of ice around itself.
So just the water that's directly in contact with it loses in a heat turn into ice.
And then it doesn't spread to the rest of the cup,
it kind of just slowly grows.
Like as this chunk of ice has been sitting in the cup,
it's just been getting like a thicker and thicker layer forming over it
that has just begun to form a layer around itself.
It's kind of like a pearl forming in an oyster.
It just builds up more and more around it.
Going to leave this in here and keep stirring it,
and hope that it keeps stealing heat away from the water,
cooling it down even more.
But I've also got some new ice cubes in the liquid nitrogen,
and I'm going to take this sort of blob cube out,
and put those new ones in, and see if we can sort of keep going,
because it is lowering the temperature in the cup,
but I'm kind of wondering if we keep doing this several times,
if we keep adding more even colder ice,
will we get to a point where the whole cup is just like too cold,
and just all solidifies?
To really push this to a limit, we've taken our cup,
filled it up with our supercooled ice, and then poured some cold water on top.
And even with that,
while we have a lot of ice forming around our cubes,
I don't think we've managed to freeze the whole cup.
We had an experiment to see if we could get a cup of water to flash freeze,
and when we put our supercooled ice cubes into the water,
it just starts forming an ice barrier around the cube,
and it really doesn't do a good job of cooling down all of the water together.
I've sort of moved to seeing if I can do a different experiment,
because I was so fascinated by how those layers of ice formed.
I'm gonna see if I can take our cube of ice,
and make sort of a rainbow shell around it.
I've got six different colors of water,
and I'm going to try doing each color,
and then like a gap layer of regular ice,
and see how well this is going to work.
Here it goes.
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All right, here is my magic egg of ice.
I don't know how to break through this nice and cleanly,
so I'm just going to kind of cut down,
and hope I get something of a clean edge.
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A little bit of a clean edge, not great.
Freezing so much, it has sort of shattered into pieces,
but that is really cool rainbow look right there.
That's seriously looks like the inside of a jawbreaker.
All right, this turned out really cool,
and you can see really clearly how thick each layer was.
Like you can count how many times I dipped it in each color,
where I just dipped into the water to sort of separate it.
But overall, this is really neat, and...
So unfortunately, we couldn't get whole cups of ice to freeze solid.
But this ice layering thing worked out really nicely,
and it took a ton of food coloring to get it to really pick up the color.
But rainbow ice looks gorgeous.
I'll try and get it like dip it in water.
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Layered ice experiment worked even better than I hoped it would.
This turned into quite the jawbreaker looking piece.
It's fascinating.
Like you can just clearly see all the layers.
I think we got some good shots where you can see the differentiation.
Even now, you can see a little bit as it separates from one into the next.
Some people can taste food coloring.
I'm not sure if I'm one of those people.
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It just tastes like ice to me.
So, whether or not you can get water to reach sort of a flash point
by putting supercooled ice cubes into it, I'm not sure.
Maybe you can, but none of our experiments got that to work.
We tried pouring really cold water over our supercool dice.
We tried putting supercooled ice cubes into the water over and over,
and we just never got the water to cool down more,
and I'm pretty sure it's because
any water that comes in contact with the supercooled ice
just starts forming a layer of ice around it.
We've done experiments on the channel before
where we showed you how you can put a water bottle
in the freezer for a certain amount of time,
and then just by hitting the bottle or tipping it out,
you can get all of it to freeze at once.
But that's not what we're going for here,
and I'm sure if we had one of those,
and dropped a supercooled ice cube in it, it would freeze.
But at that point, anything makes it freeze.
We're seeing if we could use our supercooled ice
to get the water down to that temperature,
and that wasn't very successful.
But I'm going to focus on the fact that it was really successful
making our little rainbow ice cube ball things here,
and they were there a lot of fun.
You got great variance of color.
Guys, that's all for today, but the fun does not end here.
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