deposition – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Desublimation: When water vapour freezes to ice without becoming liquid in between

mglessmer — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 10:09:42 +0000

One of my favourite phenomena right now is desublimition, or deposition: The phase transition of water vapour to ice that doesn’t go through the liquid phase. It happens when moist air is cooled below the dew point and condensation doesn’t occur spontaneously: When the supercooled water vapour then gets in touch with a cold surface, […]

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Frost flowers on ice cream: When you start thinking about phenomena and something really annoying, all of a sudden, becomes really cool.

mglessmer — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 10:05:34 +0000

Frost flowers on ice cream. You must have seen them before: They sometimes occur when you’ve had some ice cream, put the left-overs back in the freezer, and take them out again. And there you have it: Water-ice crystals all over your lovely ice cream! Completely annoying because, obviously, they only taste like water and mess […]

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Frost flowers – when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase. Examples “at sea”

mglessmer — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 11:04:50 +0000

Frost flowers! I learned about those in the context of Arctic and Antarctic ice formation. I kinda assumed that ice flowers only formed in salt water, because I remember hearing about how the ice needles that form wick up brine and that, due to their large surface (which you will remember noticing in the last post where […]

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Frost flowers – when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase. Examples on land

mglessmer — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 11:39:02 +0000

What happens when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase? Frost flowers!!! That’s when trees suddenly look like this: Btw – the stem of that tree is painted white! That’s just to confuse you a little but… But let’s take a closer look. This is what the branches look like: Tiny […]

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