

You don't know ice. Neither do I, apparently - wetzeljohn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice#Phases

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CatsoCatsoCatso
This article becomes especially interesting if you've read Kurt Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_nine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_nine)
(fictional material within Cat's Cradle)

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MattJ100
Another fun ice fact is that hot water freezes faster than cold water:
[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_water.html](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_water.html)

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judk
_in some poorly-understood conditions_

This factoid gets trotted about without ever noting the (tiny) magnitude of
the effect, it just plants a (false) idea in the readers mind that you can get
ice faster by microwaving water first.

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yarper
I remember looking at this ages ago (I browse my share of wikipedia)

trying to work out why you couldn't use ice as a submarine hull. I mean the
deeper you go the more freezes on it and the thicker it gets?

inb4 it floats, so does air

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po
There is an extremely tough material made out of frozen water and sawdust
called Pykrete:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete)

There were some plans to make ships out of it and it seems that mythbusters
did an episode on it which I haven't seen:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2009_season)#Epis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_\(2009_season\)#Episode_115_.E2.80.93_Alaska_Special_2)

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yarper
It's possibly that episode that triggered the submarine thought!

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po
Ah, I didn't notice at first that information about the original Project
Habakkuk is linked to higher up in the Ice article:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habbakuk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habbakuk)

Thinking about it now, I wonder if a better form of pykrete could be made with
a more modern expanding/insulating material than wood pulp…

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judk
Mods, please fix title.

