Supercooled Water: Instant Freeze (3D)

Chilling

Target supercooling depth -12 °C

Cooling rate 0.6 °C/s

Nucleation

Impurity / nucleation-site density 20%

Tap / trigger strength 2

Click inside the flask once it's cold to trigger nucleation — a real crystal front grows outward through the volume. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom.

Readout

Water temp

0.0 °C

Phase

Chilling

Deepest supercool

0.0 °C

Ice formed

How it works

Pure, still water can remain liquid well below 0 °C — a metastable supercooled state — because freezing needs a nucleation site (impurity, scratch, bubble) or a large thermal fluctuation to start a stable ice crystal. Classical nucleation theory predicts the nucleation rate rises steeply with both the depth of supercooling and the number of available nucleation sites, so pure water can be chilled far deeper than impure water before it spontaneously freezes.

A tap or dropped impurity supplies the missing nucleation event. The resulting crystal front spreads through the volume in real time; every gram that crystallizes releases 334 J of latent heat of fusion into the remaining liquid, warming it back toward 0 °C. Because the front's growth speed itself scales with the remaining undercooling, the whole process self-throttles: it runs fastest right after the trigger and slows as the bulk warms, settling at 0 °C with only a fraction of the water converted to ice — the real reason "instant freeze" demos produce a slush, not a solid block.

t = 0.0 s · T = 0.0 °C

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