Stunning video shows a bubble freezing in less than 30 seconds on a -28 ° C morning in Winnipeg, Canada.
The relaxing images show the bubble gently vibrating in the wind before starting to form star-shaped ice crystals, like intricately cut pieces of aluminum foil, all over the surface.
These crystals grow until the perfectly spherical bubble solidifies completely, forming a peaceful ice planet from a galaxy far, far away.
It was captured and posted on YouTube and Twitter by Heather Hinam, a Canadian-based artist, photographer and nature enthusiast.
“Cold, clear days with very little wind are great for icy bubbles,” Hinam tweeted.
‘This morning’s -28 ° C had me in the backyard with the good camera, the bubble solution and the tripod.
“Here’s a frozen moment of zen for your afternoon.”
In the video, Hinam uses a clear tube dipped in a special solution consisting of warm water, dish soap, corn syrup and sugar.
“The sugar and corn syrup, as far as I understand it, add a bit of texture to the bubble so that it doesn’t show up so quickly in the cold,” Hinam told MailOnline.
‘They still pop very easily and it usually takes several times to get one that is stable enough to freeze.
“I haven’t tried to freeze bubbles with just soap and water, but I feel like it would be harder to keep them intact long enough to freeze.”
The images show Hinam blowing through the tube and the bubble gently forming and wobbling in the morning breeze.
As early as five seconds after the bubble has formed, tiny pinpricks begin to appear white on various parts of the surface.
These pinpricks continue to expand and form a variety of jagged crystal formations with a detailed pattern, which eventually merge into a complete ice sphere.
The dynamics of frozen soap bubbles were extensively explored by experts in the 2019 study in Nature Communications. Here, beautiful star-shaped ice crystals, like intricately cut pieces of aluminum foil, form over the bubble
‘There is not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser’: the bubble eventually solidifies to form something like an ice planet of a galaxy far, far away
This beautiful phenomenon is known as the ‘snow globe effect’ and was detailed in a scientific paper published in the journal Nature Communications in 2019.
“Drops or puddles tend to freeze due to the propagation of a single frost front,” reads the article, written by Virginia Tech researchers.
‘Videographers, on the other hand, have shown that when soap bubbles freeze, an abundance of growing ice crystals can swirl around in a beautiful effect that is visually reminiscent of a snow globe.’
Study author Jonathan Boreyko and colleagues investigated the heat transfer processes that determine the dynamics of freezing soap bubbles.
The authors placed bubbles on an ice-cold surface with the chamber at two different temperature conditions and filmed the individual freezing processes.
When the bubble was deposited on an icy surface in a freezer and the ambient air was the same temperature as the bubble, the snow globe effect was observed, just like Hinam’s.
Image from the 2019 study shows the dynamics of freezing bubbles under different environmental conditions. a) bubbles deposited on an ice-cold substrate in a freezer, the freezing front caused local heating at the bottom of the bubble. This resulted in a Marangoni movement and the bell froze from multiple fronts. b) For bubbles deposited on a chilled, icy substrate in a room temperature environment, the frost front grew uniformly from bottom to top before completely stopping at a critical height
The scientists described how it resulted from a phenomenon known as a Marangoni Current, which sees a fluid flow from areas of low surface tension to areas of high surface tension, causing ice crystals to release and spin independently.
Eventually, the entire bubble freezes as the crystal collects.
In the meantime, for bubbles deposited on a cooled, icy substrate at room temperature, the ice grew in a uniform manner from bottom to top.
The bubble froze from its coldest point – where the bubble was in contact with the frozen surface – and slowly rose.
This process was halted midway through the bubble due to poor conductivity and eventually collapsed when it could no longer sustain itself.
“The frost front is slowly expanding upwards and coming to a complete stop at a critical height,” the team reported.