frost – 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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