Angela Kelly’s Frozen Bubbles: Photos and the Science of Freezing Soap Film

On a freezing December morning in 2013, Washington State photographer Angela Kelly went outside with her son and a home-made bubble mixture. The bubbles they blew froze into tiny crystal globes, patterned with feathery ice and reflecting the winter light, and her series Frozen in a Bubble soon travelled around the world.

Angela Kelly's Frozen in a Bubble

Kelly made the photographs in Washington State, blowing bubbles from a mixture of dish soap, water and Karo corn syrup. Some small bubbles froze in mid-air and shattered when they landed. Others settled on a frozen patio table or the hood of a car and froze where they sat, giving her time to work close up with the camera.

Timing mattered. “We noted how they would freeze completely before the sun rose,” Kelly told KOMO News. Once the sun came up, the bubbles began to thaw along their tops, and soon they stopped freezing at all.

How soap bubbles freeze: the snow-globe effect

In 2019, engineers at Virginia Tech led by Jonathan Boreyko published a study in Nature Communications titled How soap bubbles freeze. They filmed bubbles freezing in two different situations.

• In cold air (a walk-in freezer at about −18 °C): freezing starts at the bottom of the bubble. The freezing front warms the film locally, setting up a flow that tears off tiny ice particles. These grow to about a tenth of a millimetre within a second and swirl around the bubble, an effect the team called the “snow-globe effect”. The whole bubble freezes in about ten seconds.
• In warm air on a very cold surface: the ice creeps up from the base and then stops part-way, because heat cannot travel well along the thin frozen film. The top of the bubble stays liquid.

After several minutes, the trapped air leaks out through tiny pores in the ice and the bubble slowly sags and collapses. That explains the deflated, folded shapes in some of Kelly's photographs.

From perfect sphere to broken shell

Look through the series in order and you can follow each stage. First comes a clear sphere that mirrors its surroundings. Then branching crystals spread across the film, like frost on a window. Finally the shape gives way: the top sinks, an edge folds, and what is left looks like a fragile, open shell of ice.

Each photograph carries two kinds of detail at once. The warm bands and colours come from light reflected in the film, while the feathery texture belongs to the ice itself.

Tips for photographing frozen bubbles

• Go early: as Kelly found, the best freezing happens before sunrise, when the air is coldest and still.
• Try Kelly's recipe: dish soap and water with a little Karo corn syrup.
• Give them a landing place: a frozen table, car roof or snowbank lets bubbles settle and freeze in place.
• Get low and close: a macro lens and the low sun behind the bubble bring out the crystals.

See it in motion in our story on frozen bubbles captured on video in Manitoba, and watch ice spread across a whole lake in crystals spreading across a lake surface.

Related reading

• Frozen Bubbles at Mount Washington Observatory
• Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers beneath the Surface
• Yellowknife’s Hot-Water Cloud in Extreme Cold
• The Sheyenne River Ice Circle Seen by George Loegering

Sources