#40. Complete Wintery Experiment A) Make Snow with Boiling Water, and #41 B) Make frozen ice bubbles

Here’s the thing with #40 and #41…I’d seen these things on YouTube and Pinterest, and they looked awesome. See below. I wanted to test them out to see if they could actually happen. But in order to do this (IF it is real…), you need really, really, arctic tundra cold temperatures. And although this winter was pretty crappy, it wasn’t actually THAT cold. At least, not whenever I remembered these experiments.

So for now, we’ll have to make do with YouTube – but I can tell you about another ‘cool’ experiment I did at work (did you see what I did there? Eh? With ‘cool’? Smooth like buttaaah).

A co-worker had been researching all these science experiments that we can use to improve our school field trips. I’m working on our program called ‘Solid, Liquid, Gas’ – dealing with states of matter and chemistry, and she suggested I try this experiment where you make ‘Super Cooled Water.’

The idea is that you can actually bring the temperature of water to below zero without it freezing. To freeze exactly at zero, the water molecules need some kind of catalyst. A bit of dirt, an air bubble, or mineral they can latch onto so they can start lining up and forming the crystalline structure of ice.

Apparently. This is all from the internet. Could just be wizards

So if you freeze water without any impurities (ie. bottled, distilled water), there are no solid bits for crystals to latch onto. This means that you can bring the water down to a temperature lower than zero, because it takes more time for it to solidify.

The cool thing about this is that if you have a cup of liquid water, at a temperature of say -2 or -3 degrees Celsius, all you need to do to get those molecules lined up in a crystal ice structure is to add that catalyst. In this case, the best catalyst is a little piece of ice – water that is already frozen.

So one day at work, between giving tours, I tested it out.

My 'coffee creamer cup' of science, nestled cozily in a bed of jagged ice

Added a teeny chunk of ice, and KABLAMO!  Instantly all the water turned to ice.

It really worked. And it probably would have worked way better if I actually used scientific methods to do this. I didn’t really know if my bottled water was distilled and pure or not, and I didn’t have a thermometer. But even with my slapdash methods, the water in my cup immediately solidified, like magic, as soon as I introduced one small piece of ice.

SCIENCE, man! It’s a thing that I did! 

(For an actual video, you could watch this: Not exactly the same experiment as mine, but look at this cutie patootie narrating!)