Cool Destruction!!! Water Vs Bottle

It was a hot Hyderabad summer day and we ran out of cold water in the fridge. My wife, in an attempt to get water cooled rapidly, kept a water bottle in the freezer section. And then we forgot.

She opened the freezer next day and this is what she found.

Broken bottle

Yes, that is a real picture clicked from my cellphone camera. Excuse for the not so impressive background of the picture.

My wife was clearly disappointed with the condition of the bottle (she chose these bottles to match the color theme of rest of the kitchen stuff, and now her set of 6 bottles was short of one) but I was a little amused. It was a moment for me to travel back in time.

I had a video playing in my head. It was of the science lecture in school, 6^th or 7^th standard perhaps, where my science teacher was teaching about the properties of water.

So why did the bottle break actually? Usually, any substance reduces in volume when cooled and the density increases. Water follows the same trend but only when cooled till 4ºC. Go cool it further, and you are up for a surprise. Water has maximum density at 4ºC and cooling it further makes the water expand, thus decreasing the density.

Variation of density of water with temperature

Well, not a big deal, right? May be not for you. But my wife was really upset about the bottle for next 5 long minutes. My smile was just adding to her pain. And then, I had to take her to a time travel trip as well. After next one minute, both of us were happy like children, as we just saw a practical of the theoretical knowledge we got in the school lecture. After all, it was just a bottle.

But it is not always just a bottle. The above phenomenon causes problems that are more serious. Pipe bursts in cold countries are a very good example of this. So if you are a science kid, give this a try : Fill a plastic bottle(caution: DO NOT use glass bottle due to safety reasons) to the max with water and put the cap tightly, put it in freezer and forget. See what happens to it in a couple of days. Come back to this blog post to put a picture of your little science experiment in the comments.

Nerd Note 1:  Now you know the reason why your soft drink bottles are not filled up to full, but have little empty space.

Nerd Note 2: Expansion of water while freezing into ice means that ice has lesser density than the water at nearly freezing temperatures, thus explaining why ice floats on water.

Nerd Note 3: The phenomenon is popularly known as ‘Anomalous expansion of water’.

So let us know if you remember this science lecture from your childhood. And don’t forget to share the results of your experiment by putting a picture in the comments.

And as always,

Thanks for reading.

Ayush!!!