My freezer is set at -21°C (-6°F) and tubs of ice cream come out hard as a rock and are near impossible to scoop. But if I set it a few degrees warmer, yet still way below the freezing point of water, I can scoop it easily. So, is there such a thing as both frozen and *really* frozen? Conversely, a boiling point is a boiling point, I believe. Heating water to a temp above 100°C gets you the same steam that you got at 100, just faster. Right?
In: 102
I actually had to take a dive in to the subject and I did find some graphs about this. But couldn’t read much further other than abstracts and maybe few graphs, because fucking everything is behind a paywall!
But indeed it would appear that ice’s compressive and tensile strength, along with strain rate, does increase as it gets colder. However, there are way more variables to this than just temperature, including grain size and crystal structure which is a complicated thing of it’s own.
But there are different types ice we know of. As someone who lives in Finland and where seas freeze there is a term for this really strong sea ice, called “Teräsjää” *steel ice*. Which is the “default ice” that all other ice is measured against. It is what is used to calculate whether ice roads (as in road built on frozen sea) can be used to access places.
But about boiling. It isn’t as simple as that. You can check the phase [diagram of water](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg), from which we can see that at 1/1000th of bar pressure, water boils at -25Celcius (249K). Going up, we know that at 10 bars water boils at 200 Celsius (474K).
But ice does sublimate at any temperature. Basically that if air is has less humidity in it than it can carry, water molecules will move to it from ice. This is why if you put a tray of ice in to the freezer and leave it there for a long time it disappears. Just like water when liquid will evaporate in to the air if it is dry, no matter the temperature.
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