Cavechat.org

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.

ya you can post pics, an easy way is to put your photo in some places like photobucket.com and then copy the img code here, and poof, your pic gets posted. I can't wait to see the pics, sounds cool.

It doesn't look like helictite behavior to me, but rather blowing water vapor and freezing from the outside in. You can tell because of the trapped air bubbles. Water that freezes from the inside out is clear, without bubbles.

Hence, the freezing rods of that clear cylindrical ice you buy in bags at the store.

iceagecaver wrote: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?

Welcome to the NSS Forum. The fastest way to post images is to click on the "Add image to post" text link right under the box where you type your message. That will let you upload and post a thumbnail of the pic in your post (remember, some people are still on dial-up and don't like large images in the post).