Can hot water freeze faster than cold water?

I am not reading all that now, but I remember learning about that in school!

McTag,

Your hypothesis sounds plausible. Essentially you are saying that since the soil freezes from the top down, a temperature gradient is established. This in turn, on the expulsion of salts and minerals from solution creates a salinity gradient and therefore osmotic pressure from the bottom up. Osmotic pressure is well known to do mechanical work (eg the bulging of a membrane in the lab).

This idea suggests that frost heaves would be stronger when the ground freezes quickly.

/Kayyam

Kayyam wrote:

McTag,

Your hypothesis sounds plausible. Essentially you are saying that since the soil freezes from the top down, a temperature gradient is established. This in turn, on the expulsion of salts and minerals from solution creates a salinity gradient and therefore osmotic pressure from the bottom up. Osmotic pressure is well known to do mechanical work (eg the bulging of a membrane in the lab).

This idea suggests that frost heaves would be stronger when the ground freezes quickly.

/Kayyam

Well that's encouraging. Thank you sir.

Let's call it the McTag-Kayyam Effect.