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A photographer captured fascinating images of a soap bubble freezing and turning into a delicate snowball after the temperatures drop in Winnipeg, Canada.
The stunning images were captured by Heather Hinam, Canadian naturalist, artist, photographer and educator. She shared the video on Twitter, noting that “cold, clear days with very little wind are great for freezing bubbles.”
“This morning -28 C [minus 18.4 degrees Fahrenheit] took me out into the yard with the right camera, bubble solution, and tripod, “Hinam wrote.” Here is a moment of frozen Zen for your afternoon. “
In the video, Hinam uses a transparent tube dipped in soap to blow a bubble on a snow covered surface. As the bubble moves smoothly, pitting ice begins to stain the soap film; these bites progressively become larger, forming iridescent patches of ice crystals. Each icy patch contains dazzling, snowflake-like textures, and as the patches grow larger they eventually blend into each other and form a complete sphere.
Related: Frozen Family Fun: Try These Cold Weather Science Experiments
The effect is startling – but how does it work? The phenomenon once intrigued scientists, but in 2019, a group of physicists figured out and published their results in the journal Nature communications.
The bigger mystery was how multiple patches of ice form on soap bubbles, rather than the ice that forms from a single large slab that expands to cover the entire sphere. Usually, when a small amount of liquid freezes, the freezing process begins at a single point of origin; this frozen area then cools the adjacent liquid, and so on until all the liquid cools and freezes, Nova reported. This process governs the formation of an ice cube in your freezer, for example.
Bubbles follow this rule at first, but quickly deviate from the pattern, the authors of the 2019 article found.
In a freezing environment, a single point of the bubble begins to freeze first, like with an ice cube. When this point freezes, molecules in liquid water rearrange and merge to become a solid, and this rearrangement releases a small amount of energy in the form of heat.
But since a bubble is a hollow sphere, this heat dissipates into the remaining liquid water and causes it to flow up the bubble. As the bubble freezes, more heat is released and the water flow becomes stronger. This causes the ice crystals to burst on the frozen pieces of the bubble and the shroud of its surface. Each of these crystals forms its own ice seeding colony, which grows larger, creating the fascinating “snow globe” effect.
If you want to try freezing bubbles on your own, wait for the temperature to drop below zero and blow the bubbles in the air; this way the bubbles will freeze before they hit the ground, Previously reported Live Science. The colder it is outside, the better it works.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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