When drilling a hole into a rock, filling it with water, and freezing it, why does it expand outward to break the rock rather than extrude out of the hole that was drilled?
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This can happen, to some extent. Ever pulled out a tray of ice cubes from your freezer and [found them to be spiky](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5RLQ9WMP2Es/maxresdefault.jpg)? Or perhaps, more commonly, with a little raised dimple in the center? That’s more or less caused by exactly what you describe.
However, that’s only really possible when the ice freezes top-down due to the cold air in your freezer, with the ice cube tray having nice, smooth, sloped or curved edges that help the ice cube push up and out as it grows.
Water poured into rough, craggy, freezing cold crevices, on the other hand, freeze from all sides inward simultaneously, locking the water’s shape and not allowing it to “squeeze out”. So it simply expands. You can block the expansion if you have a container that’s capable of containing the pressure. Solid rock is not one of those containers.
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