It is possible for water to freeze so quickly as happened on Lost in Space?
On the first episode of Netflix Lost in Space,
Judy get's stuck on ice while trying to get a battery inside submerged Jupiter.
Accordingly to what was said on the episode, we know:
- The planet's environment: "earth-like atmosphere, air-pressure and gravity"
- The lake's depth: "once the water freezes, the Jupiter's gonna be locked in 50 feet of solid ice."
- The temperature: "in six hours, the sun's gonna go down, and indications are, it will drop to 60 degrees below zero"
So, given this information, is it possible for water to freeze so quickly like that?
Best Answer
It's not possible
The problem is that ice is a very good insulator, so the thicker the ice, the better the insulation is. The time for increasing the thickness of ice increases in fact quadratically: 1 cm in 1 day means 2cm in 4 days, 3 cm in 9 days.
This is the reason fishes can survive in big garden lakes with depths of 1.5 - 2 m even in extremely harsh winters.
Assuming that the explorers use centigrade, -60°C is pretty cold and can freeze the surface in a depth of few cms pretty fast. But 50 feet (yeah, the explorers still use thumb widths and kings feet) needs years.
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Would water freeze instantly in space?
So the freezing process would be incredibly slow, unless there were some way to expose every water molecule individually to the vacuum of space itself.How long does it take for something to freeze in space?
It's also very cold in space. You'll eventually freeze solid. Depending on where you are in space, this will take 12-26 hours, but if you're close to a star, you'll be burnt to a crisp instead. Either way, your body will remain that way for a long time.Can space freeze things?
Acute exposure to the vacuum of space: No, you won't freeze (or explode) One common misconception is that outer space is cold, but in truth, space itself has no temperature. In thermodynamic terms, temperature is a function of heat energy in a given amount of matter, and space by definition has no mass.Why did the water freeze instantaneously?
A video shows water in a bottle freezing instantly just by hitting it on a surface. Why does this happen? It is because the water in the bottle is supercooled. A supercooled liquid is one in which the temperature is below its normal freezing point, but the liquid has not solidified.Three Men Lost in Space – The Apollo 13 Disaster
More answers regarding it is possible for water to freeze so quickly as happened on Lost in Space?
Answer 2
Also water freezes from the top down, not the bottom up. As Thorsten pointed out you can have a frozen lake with fish swimming around under the ice. So the surface should have been the first thing to freeze, not the last.
Answer 3
50 feet is 15 metres. Baikal lake speed of the ice growing is 1 to 5 cm a day. Even if we assume (wrongly) that growth is constant it would take 300 days to freeze water to such depth.
The only way to speed up the process would be super cooling so the water is somehow carbohydrated by day and with night it loose all bubbles and turn solid.
Answer 4
it's not just that what baffles me: if there was water when they crash landed, either the day must have been incredibly long, allowing so much ice to melt, or it must have been boiling hot during the day, which clearly wasnt the case. This is so poorly thought thru, it barely qualifies as sci-fi. Just -fi.
Just forgot to mention, it rained at some point after the sudden freezing!?
And so why did they not freeze? A human is 90 percent or so water. Why is the freezing confined to the water around the ship??
Answer 5
It's not impossible but certainly would not happen in the manner depicted in the show. The water would need to be supercooled in order to freeze in the manner depicted, and if it was approaching -60C, that's approaching the limit of even supercooled water to remain liquid. Water reaching temperatures that low must be incredibly pure (aka not polluted by spaceship debris and dust from the impact), and all of Judy's kicking and movement would have disturbed the water and caused it to begin freezing around her first.
I believe that the inspiration for this episode comes from several urban legends about lakes in Switzerland, the U.S., or Russia snap-freezing and trapping horses or people in the ice (the details depend on the retelling).
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