A drop of water that freezes from the outside-in presents an intriguing problem: the expansion of water upon freezing is incompatible with the self-confinement by a rigid ice shell. High-speed imaging reveals that this conundrum is resolved through an intermittent fracturing of the brittle ice shell and cavitation in the enclosed liquid, culminating in a violent explosion of the partially frozen droplet.
Read more about the physics behind this fascinating phenomenon in our article:
"Fast Dynamics of Water Droplets Freezing from the Outside In," PRL 2017 (prl: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.084101 arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06818)
