Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: The Power of Sublimation

Remember how, whenever the criminal du jour needed to add that creepy effect to his fake ghost story, the villain from Scooby-Doo would always employ dry ice and water to create his ghostly fog. I think Scooby even made some donuts out of the dry ice fog once. Mmmm...carbon dioxide. So tasty.

I guess if you're a stoner and a dog--stone dog--then when the munchies hit, you have to respond, right?

When I was a lad, I remember my mother helping to make a parade for a float in the parade for our local festival. They needed to create a smoky effect coming out of a pot. For some strange reason, with all the papier mache, streamers and tissue all mounted onto a particle board frame with a tractor pulling it unsteadily down the road, they shied away from using actual fire. So, they opted for dry ice in water. I remember seeing the result--a few wisps of smoke-like vapor escaping the top of the cauldron--and being completely underwhelmed.

I've since learned that, if one wants a really good fog effect from dry ice, isopropyl alcohol--otherwise known as "rubbing alcohol"--gives a great plume of foggy carbon dioxide. So, there you go. In case you find yourself working on a float in the near future and you need a good, boiling plume of fog, drop some chunks of dry ice into rubbing alcohol. Just be sure to recharge the alcohol from time to time, because as it gets colder, the effect cools a bit. Heh. Pun.

Dry ice--which is frozen carbon dioxide--undergoes one of those rare phase shifts from solid to gas, called sublimation. Most of the time, we think of solids turning liquid first and then going to gas, but some things go straight from their solid form to their gas phase. Snow will do this sometimes in the winter, as well. The net result of the sublimation of dry ice to carbon dioxide gas is the nice fog effect.

We can also harvest the awesome power of the sublimation explosively. Don't believe me? Take a look.

For some reason, seeing that cinder block get blown to gravel really amused me. I think part of it is because I went to undergrad with this guy named Seville that someone once described as having "a personality like a cinder block." The damnedest thing was, that description was dead accurate.

Walking monoliths aside, I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the power that this showed. If I were to guess, I would have thought that the force would escape up and away from the block where the bottle was not holding it. Shows what I know about explosive forces.

Now, I'm not telling you to go out and try this stunt at home, but after watching this, I would make damned sure that the dry ice bomb doesn't go off in your hand. Otherwise, you might be getting the Tyr experience without all the fun of tricking Fenrir.

See what I did there? Brilliant, no? I thought so, too.