Why does ice make that crinkle sound when put in a cup of water?
In: Chemistry
Likely heatstress fractures.
If a cool object suddenly has a small part heated up the atoms in a localised area will expand pushing out at the cooler parts.
If the medium being suddenly heated is brittle and bad at conducting as the heated area expands it causes a fracture. Brittle and poor at conducting are aspects that sufficiently frozen ice have.
Glass does this too… me and my bros learned this the hard way by using a can of deodorant as a flame thrower on a window on a cold winter night. 5 seconds of flame and we started to hear a crackle.
When things change temperature, they chance size. When one side of an object heats up a lot, and the other side doesn’t, the hotter/bigger side tries to tear the colder/smaller side apart. This can form cracks and cause shattering. More stretchy materials, or materials that are strong in tension (harder to pull apart) tend to put up well with sudden temperature changes. This is why pouring ice water in a warm (normal) glass will often crack it, but doing something similar in pyrex or steel will be fine.
Ice is brittle, so it breaks under stress. When you put ice in water, the outside warms up to 0°C, while the inside remains, for a while at least, at the temperature of your freezer (~-18°C). This means that the outside expands, putting the inside under strong tension – too much tension for the ice’s quite weak structure, so it cracks.
When the temperature of an object is drastically changed quickly, it can cause cracks and stuff to happen. So the ice went from being really cold to being in room temperature water, which is why it makes a cracking sound when you put it in water. You’ll also see cracks inside the ice.
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