Flash-freeze water bottle?
 

Okay, so I pulled a water bottle out of my mini-fridge just a minute ago, and opened it up. Starting at the top, and moving down, the water crystallized into ice over about a five-second period. Can anyone explain to me what exactly I just watched?

It might not have had room to freeze so it couldn't freeze till it had room to expand? I've used a similar concept involving gasoline and a sobe bottle to make a pillar of fire.

Nope. Fill a metal sphere with liquid water and chuck it into liquid nitrogen. It explodes like a grenade. More than likely he just managed to supercool the water because it was stupidly pure just like stupidly pure water can be superheated and boil explosively when you put a spoon into it.

Huh. Well, my minifridge is ridiculously cold. There were frozen bottles on top of it. And it being bottled water and all, it wouldn't surprise me. It says it is "micron filtered, ozonated, and UV" whatever that means.

Um... it doesn't have temperatures. It is just set to MAX. As to the water, it appears to be Walgreen's brand spring water. Also, it was sealed while it was in there, it didn't freeze until I broke the seal.

Beacause that's when the air hit it and gave something for the ice crystals to form on. See they are like pearls in the sense that they form much more easily on something. So if you have very pure water in a very smooth water bottle and you cool it slowly enough you'll generally end up with supercooled water. It also has to be kept more or less totally still during the process. If you had shaken it violently instead of opening it it would have frozen as well.

Wait, what about Room conditions?

It happened after you open it outside the mini fridge, so it has to be a chemical reaction related to oxygen and room temperature

No, not even in the slightest. Its just that particular act disturbed it enough to start the nucleation and freezing process which then proceeded at an exponentially increasing rate because the water was already well below freezing. Again if he had just shaken the bottle violently it would also have frozen. Because the bottle he took was buried on the bottom it didn't get bumped and moved as he moved stuff in and out of the fridge so it had plenty of undisturbed time to supercool.

Yeah, there's no chemical reaction. It's purely mechanical.

If you can't supercool a bottle of water like he did, you could always try to make a supersaturated salt solution. Then all you need to do is pour it over a seed crystal and BAM, all the excess salt decides to crystalize out at once. It's pretty cool stuff.

I mean, look at it! Though, I have issues with the video calling the resulting crystal 'ice'.

This exact thing happened to me a few years ago, but I was really sick at the time so I thought I imagined it. I had the flu, and I found this water bottle int the back of our freezer, which was conveniently unfrozen, so I grabbed it and shuffled over to the couch, and when I opened the bottle it was solid ice. I MUST repeat this...

Actualy its like this
It is "superfreezing" persay but the bottle must have been standing strait up and must have been REALLY FREAKING COLD in order for this to happen
i found this as well

That is in fact the supercooling process but there are absolutely no restrictions other than it has to be colder than freezing and nucleation must be suppressed. In fact The Argent Lord commented that the bottle was under other bottles most likely indicating the bottles where on their side. Though the colder and slower you freeze the water the greater chance you'll get supercooling.

i just read somewhere that it doesn't matter as long as you don't agitate it so i was wrong there but yes i just looked up supercooling...interesting stuff would be a fun experiment later

You know, deep down, im really disapointed at all of you.. with all you "science" and "facts" and "logic" not one of you were kind enough to actually consider the possibility of Argent Lord having developed superhuman freezing powers... FO'SHAME

It's really easy to do with carbonated drinks, which stay liquid slightly below 0°C. Then when you open them usually some of the gas escapes and voila.