Scientific American: Ask the Experts: Chemistry: Occasionally the ice cubes in my freezer's ice trays will develop a stalagmitelike shape without any obvious, unusual interference. Can you please explain what causes this?

Scientific American: Ask the Experts: Chemistry: Occasionally the ice cubes in my freezer's ice trays will develop a stalagmitelike shape without any obvious, unusual interference. Can you please explain what causes this?

See also http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~smorris/edl/icespikes/icespikes.html

About 8 months ago, our small web development company moved into a historic office building in downtown Knoxville, TN. We got settled in and comfortable and slowly collected our own comfortable space for coding, design, and most importantly, break time.

Our simple refrigerator had plenty of room for ice trays, an ice pack for my knees which flare up from time to time, and several frozen lunches for the employees I work with.

But soon enough, one of my co-workers and I started to notice that our ice-trays had weird things happening. Our ice cubes were growing spikes! Well, after months of trading theory back and forth (and debunking each theory as we saw fit), I finally come across an answer! It appears someone has already been studying this, and as he says on his web site: "you are not alone ...".

Take a look!