Anybody else ever seen helictites of ice? I'm going to grow some more today. It is the darndest thing. They make great handles when extracting the cubes.
All I can figure is that the freezer blows super cold air right on the trays, and the outer water freezes, trapping the liquid water inside under lots of pressure, and the water somehow finds a way to escape, but it does it like an helictite, and creates a tube. Most of the time I find the helictite frozen solid with a round ice droplet at the edge, or often 'air eroded' by the low humidity of the frost free freezer, but once I actually caught it with the water droplet still liquid.
I'm new to these forums (been an NSS member for a while), can we post pix in the body of this message if I got out my macro lens to show folks?
Picture of the one that grew today on FredMiranda.com, which needs more cave photographers to post pix!
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/523451/0
OK, a poster on FredMiranda says he sees these at work in a freezer, but he indicated that it was a very cold commercial style freezer, not your run of the mill kitchen fridge. I bet this phenomenon is related to freezing water very fast.