A bottle. Is it because of the gases
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Water expands when it freezes. Glass is very brittle and can easy break when the liquid inside it expands.
Short answer is yes, because of the gas.
Any container filled with water and placed in the freezer will rupture. The ice will expand and eventually break the container. However, they don’t violently explode like carbonated drinks will. The reason a soda explodes in the freezer is the same reason it explodes when shaking it: rapid release of the dissolved gases. Once the can ruptures the contents are no longer under pressure, and the dissolved carbon dioxide is free to enter the gas phase again as bubbles.
Another important factor at play here are nucleation sites. Bubbles need nucleation points in order to form: without them no bubbles will form. In the lab, it can be dangerous to boil water in glassware because the glass is too smooth, and can cause the water to become super heated. To combat this, we use a boiling chip to provide a site for the air bubbles to form.
When you shake up a can of soda, some of the air from the top of the can gets trapped as small bubbles on the sides of the can, providing small nucleation sites for the CO2. That’s why tapping on the sides “disarms” a shaken can of soda and it can be opened without exploding! With a can placed in the freezer, the ice that forms before the can ruptures provides lots of nucleation sites.
So, putting it all together, the ice crystals pierce the can, releasing the pressure and providing nucleation sites for a rapid and forceful expulsion of the soda!
Edit: typos
It’s not just soda, if you tried freezing a bottle of water it would explode too, as it’s been said it happens because water expands when freezing.
That is actually quite peculiar, since most substances do the opposite.
Soda, beer… everything you drink is mostly made of water, so they behave this way.
It’s due to a combination of factors.
Normal, uncarbonated water expands as it freezes and will likely shatter the container it’s in if said container doesn’t have enough room for the frozen water to expand.
In the case of carbonated water or soda, the CO2 gas contained in the liquid adds pressure to the already expanding liquid and will shatter the container even faster.
There is already a good explanation here, so let me just add some details why water is so different. Usually, materials contract when getting cooled down, it’s the intuitive way of thinking of a material’s building blocks wiggling less and less as the temperature drops. Also, fluids are moving building blocks that need more space since they wiggle their way around each other, and solids are frozen in a compact form that uses even less space.
This image however assumes that the building blocks do not attract each other much, and if, then these attractions are not directional. In water, both of these assumptions are very wrong. Water, when freezing, establishes very strong attractions, but these are very directional and every water binds to only 4 neighbors. This uses much more space, but such a network is extremely favorable for the water. You can freeze water in random orientation the way it was when being a fluid (we use that flash freezing in protein crystallography for example), but if you give it time to freeze, it will always establish this highly ordered, space-consuming network. Building that network is so favorable that the water can build up a good amount of pressure, forcing it’s way into the surrounding just to get this frozen state going. That’s when your bottle pops, your tubings burst, your plant leaves start hanging when left outside.
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