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Ice Spike Observations

Updated:  Feb. 16, 2005

Recap:  In late 2000, soon after swearing off tap water and switching to distilled water for my ice cubes, I noticed these anomalous 'ice spikes' growing out of the trays in my lab refrigerator.  They grew straight up, or at a slight angle, out of the cubes.  The typical length was 1.5" to 2" (the longest measured 2.2"), and they would form in around 5 to 8 minutes.  I could even watch them grow in real time and did (tv monitor hooked to the video camera while the event was recording).  I also shot close-up video of several events from start to finish using an X10 brand color video/audio camera and I maxed that camera's close-up capabilities.  My next step is to get another sacrificial video camera with better optics.  At first I thought these growths strange and tried to dismiss them, surely I wasn't the only person on the planet using distilled water for my ice cubes.  However, I did immediately make the connection with the distilled water and how 'spring waters' would produce something like half the effect, if that.  After realizing these ice spikes weren't a one time event and just wouldn't go away, I did a little searching on the web and didn't find anything, maybe I didn't use the right search criteria but I found nothing.  I then began showing these pictures to friends and others that I knew, hoping someone would have a clue but no one could shed any light.

In May of 2001, I decided to start a serious investigation and began by searching out some physics professors who, I thought, would know if this was an unknown process or not, not wanting to re-invent the wheel or otherwise waste my time.  I soon located three professors that specialized in ice formation.  I e-mailed photos, video and commentary to Ken Libbrecht, Peter Baum and another, and they too were stumped; although, one of them did, indirectly, accuse me of sending him doctored video!  You know you're onto something when that happens.  I then spent several months determining what was not causing this growth as the freezer was piled high with, and in close proximity to, many spools of magwire, wound coils, magnets, Tesla coils, plasma spheres, plasma tubes, et. al.  Quite a few potential emf sources to isolate and/or eliminate.  They seemed like a, however unlikely, component of the process, but they were not.  The old lab was just too crowded and I was never able isolate that refrigerator to my satisfaction, so I spent a few months during the evenings and weekends chasing red herrings.

I moved to a larger house and lab on September 9, 2001 and by December of that year I had run down a few lines of inquiry to my satisfaction, isolated the mechanisms at work and cobbled together a quick paper and mailed it off to The Electric Space Craft Journal.  It was around that time that I stumbled onto two of N. Tesla's little known magnifying Tesla coil diagrams that didn't seem to have ever been built and I was off and running on the design and construction of one of those, the results of which can be seen on my Magnifier page.  Also, those Tesla diagrams are accessible from that same page. 

So a few years went by and I hadn't thought much about these ice spikes until it was brought to my attention in March 2004, that there were some recent papers written on them.  Also, I did recently (April 2004) find a few other websites with reports of this phenomena, I believe these articles/papers dated from 1923, early 70's and 1990, and there's probably more, I'll try to get a proper list with names, dates and papers and post it here.  I still need to do a better job of transcribing and organizing my lab notes but I hope to get around to it fairly soon and will post them here although Prof. Libbrecht's papers essentially mirrors what I've found.  I believe the main difference is that he uses the proper names of some of the forces at work and processes that I had to describe in simpler terms, he's the pro in this field, right?  If anyone reading this subscribes to the Electric Space Craft Journal, my article was published in the January 2002 issue of this research magazine.  It's primarily devoted to physics/electro-magnetics and is well worth subscribing to.  I'll scan and post it here also. 

Yet another resource:  www.physics.utoronto.ca/~smorris/edl/icespikes/icespikes.html

All photos are thumbnails, click on them to see great detail in their structure

All ice spikes in these photos are 1.3" to 2" long

12 Nov. 2001 -  Photo 1 - color photo of the first two trays of distilled water in the new house.  Photo 2  - the first potassium permanganate experiment (75mg kmno4 in 350ml dist. water).  You can see that the mechanism that produced these ice crystals drew the potassium permanganate up into the growing crystal through the middle.

1                                2

Below, photos added 11-19.  Photo 4 - grown from degassed distilled water, note the very different triangular shape.  Photo 5 - depicts the water channel from base to tip, the channels leave a tell-tale trail of bubbles.  Photo 6 - two different designs of plastic of trays, both producing the spikes.  Photo 7 - the underside of a developed crystal, liquid water still occupied the center of the cube when I separated it from the tray.

11-2-01                   4                             5                            6                            7                            8

I began moving to my new house 9-9-01 and one of the first items I moved was my refrigerator and as I was moving in I began inserting trays of tap water.  Nothing happened, just normal ice cubes.  After ten days I bought some 'spring water' and used up the entire container in making ice cubes with no result.  I thought this unusual because spring water worked in the old lab, but just what is spring water?  Different brands could be almost anything.  Next, I bought a 2.5 gallons of distilled water and the formations below promptly sprouted.  The tallest crystal is about 2" tall.

                     9                           10                          11                           12                                     13

Photos 10 & 11 - the new freezer setup.  This graduated backdrop will help in judging growth while shooting video, the scale is 0.2" per division.  One note for freezer videographers, energize the camera as soon as you place it in the freezer and do not leave an unpowered camera in a freezer.  Failure to follow those directions can, and probably will, damage the camera.  I lost one or two before realizing this.

It now appears that at least two of the keys to growing these crystals are a purified water and blowing, cold air.  I also speculate that the moving air provides an electrostatic force which is necessary for these to form.  I believe this because they won't grow when covered, there must be air flowing over the tray!  This would be very difficult to measure and I'm still trying to determine the best way to do this.  Perhaps a miniature gold-leaf electroscope touching the tray would provide some evidence of moving air causing charge separation/accumulation and it can be captured in the same video that is trained on the trays.    Another point about these growths:  As they grow to about 0.75" to 1.0", they accumulate a liquid water reservoir at the top half, they will not be pointed at this stage but rather stubby and fat compared to the final product.  This reservoir than feeds the remaining one inch or so of the growth with the top half getting thinner as it draws from this remaining liquid water, terminating with a needle-like appearance.  I believe that as the ice cube freezes, it forces this small amount of water up the ice-spike and into this reservoir, the channel then freezes shut and the growth continues until the reservoir is exhausted.  Perhaps the hypothesized electrostatic force circulates the water at the tip and prevents it from freezing over.  Freezer temperature varied from zero to 10 degrees F.

I purchased three sets of differently styled plastic trays and the crystals formed in all three.  I've not used metal trays as I reasoned the metal would cool the water too rapidly for the formations to occur but that's another experiment yet to perform as is the placing of styrofoam and copper under individual trays.  Using steam distilled water is another possibility.

14                       15                            16                        17

Photos 14, 15 & 16 - show what happened when I opened & closed the freezer while they were forming.  In 14 & 15 the crystals were 'killed' and the formation halted as the jarring of the freezer door damaged these fragile growths.  However, in photo 16, this crystal was able to continue its growth but at an odd angle.

Here's a link to series of photos of the growth in progress taken one minute apart:  Ice Spike Growth

What changed from start to finish in a video of this growth

The first photo below was from Peter Baum, he processed the video I posted of the growth and extracted what changed and the photo below is his result.  The round red area is a crystal that grew up about 1/4" and then grew away from the camera, it appears as a bump in the video.  That crystal was wide like a ribbon and bent over and grew out about 3/4" tapering to a point.

Below is a negative of the above photo, slightly enlarged.  The negative image more clearly illustrates the changes from the first frame of the video to the last.  The second photo below is a color photo of the tray which developed the ice spikes that the above and below photos were taken from.

Click this link to see a 1.16mb page of the growth B/W Sequence                        To Top of Page