Eli5 why does soda, in the freezer, explode?

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A bottle. Is it because of the gases

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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