Have you ever experienced the "ice cube stalagmite" or "ice cube spike" or in your freezer? This is such a fun phenomenon! I do a little celebratory dance when it happens to me. Plus, the ice cube then has a natural handle built into it, so it lifts out of the tray oh-so-easily.

But alas, it only happens to one ice cube in the tray, and even then, not all the time.

Theorists believe that ice cube spikes are formed if the ice cube freezes from the bottom upward, and from the sides inward. In this case, the freezing water, which wants to expand, has nowhere to go but up. The forming ice raises itself out of the water into a gravity-defying "reverse icicle".

If so it is, then an ice cube tray with a built-in bottom cooler which causes its bottom to be even cooler than the rest of your freezer, and which is made out of a metal which transfers the cool bottom-coldness to the framework of the ice tray, should produce 12 stalagmites without fail on every use. Woo-hoo!

(See linked picture)
-- phundug, Jul 21 2003

Ice cube spike http://www.physics....ikes/Ice_Spike4.jpg
(or "Stalagmite" or "Reverse Icicle") [phundug, Oct 04 2004]

http://www.halbertcicles.com/ The site's owner mailed in this link. [jutta, Mar 09 2006]

Can I have a version that fires them?
-- DrCurry, Jul 21 2003


theorists, what do they know? I think it has more to do with fairies taking a skinny dip.
-- po, Jul 21 2003


jutta, got to be!
-- po, Jul 21 2003



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