At −45 °C, a soap bubble does not simply pop. In Ted Goossen's 2009 video from Thompson, Manitoba, he and his wife blow bubbles into the frozen air and watch what the extreme cold does to them. The clip found a new audience in December 2013, when HuffPost Canada shared it.
The Thompson bubble video
Goossen filmed the experiment on a day when the temperature in Thompson stood at −45 °C (−49 °F). The video ended with a different cold-weather classic: a pot of boiling water thrown into the air.
How cold is Thompson, Manitoba?
Thompson lies in north-central Manitoba, about 761 km north of Winnipeg. The city grew around a nickel mine: Inco found a major ore body in February 1956, founded the town in 1957 and named it after its chairman, and Thompson became a city in 1970. Today it has about 13,000 residents and calls itself the "Hub of the North", serving communities across northern Manitoba.
- January daily mean: −23.4 °C (−10.1 °F).
- Record low: −48.9 °C (−56 °F), so Goossen's −45 °C day sits close to the extreme end.
- Getting there: Highway 6 from Winnipeg, the Via Rail Winnipeg–Churchill train and Thompson Airport.
- Nearby: Pisew Falls, 13 m high and one of Manitoba's two highest waterfalls, lies 74 km south on Highway 6; in town, the Spirit Way path has Canada's largest photo-realistic mural and dozens of painted wolf statues.
The science of frozen soap bubbles
In 2019, a Virginia Tech team led by mechanical engineer Jonathan Boreyko explained the swirling ice crystals seen in videos like Goossen's. Writing in Nature Communications, Boreyko, Farzad Ahmadi, Saurabh Nath and Christian Kingett set bubbles on an icy surface at −20 °C and filmed them freezing.
The bubble quickly filled with floating crystals. Freezing releases heat, and the base of the bubble ended up about 14 degrees warmer than the top (−6 °C against −20 °C). That difference changes the surface tension of the film and drives a Marangoni flow from the warm region towards the cold. The flow lifts crystals off the bottom and swirls them around the bubble in a "snow globe" effect, and each crystal becomes a new freezing front, so the whole bubble freezes faster. In warmer lab air, by contrast, the bubble froze from the bottom up only part of the way before the freezing front stopped.
How to freeze soap bubbles yourself
- Wait for a calm day well below freezing; the colder the air, the faster and more complete the freeze.
- Blow the bubble gently and catch it on the wand, or let it settle on snow or a chilled surface where you can watch it.
- Low sun from behind makes the crystals sparkle on camera.
Leave the boiling-water trick to watching. Thrown water can fall back as scalding drops before it has time to freeze. For more, see Angela Kelly’s frozen-bubble photographs and a different cold-weather freezing demonstration.
Related reading
- Yellowknife’s Hot-Water Cloud in Extreme Cold
- The January 2014 US Cold Outbreak: Forecasts, Observations and Winter Impacts
- Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers beneath the Surface
- A Wisconsin Cold-Weather Stunt in Its Original Setting
- An Ice-Covered Stairwell: The Photographs Behind a Temperature Claim
- Frozen Bubbles at Mount Washington Observatory
- Spectacular Photos of Bubbles Frozen in Frigid Temperatures
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