Temperatures dipping below -20 C are usually a good reason to stay indoors, but Montreal’s David Freiheit had other ideas last weekend.
“You know what we do outside when it’s -23?” he asks in a YouTube video filmed during a recent cold snap in Central and Eastern Canada.
The answer? Boil water and toss it into the sky.
In the video posted earlier this week, Freiheit runs outside in a T-shirt and jeans with a kitchen pot and then hurls the boiled water in the air. It instantly evaporates into a cloud of water vapour, some of it coming down around him like snow.
The scientific theory known as the “Mpemba effect” explains the phenomenon: hot water evaporates more quickly than cold water.
It wasn’t the first time Freiheit has filmed the trick. He posted a video in 2016 of himself running onto a frozen lake to produce the cloud.
Other videos have gone viral over the years, including one out of Russia in 2012 in which a man throws boiling water off a balcony in -41 C temperatures. A similar viral video out of Northern Ontario in 2012 showed a man firing a water gun filled with boiling water in -41 C.
