Unfortunately the school was closed because of the snow and we had to postpone, leaving me with 25 litres of unused LIQUID NITROGEN!<\/p>\n
However, this gave me a great opportunity to answer a question I often get asked at schools – what happens if you introduce water or snow to liquid nitrogen? If I could build a snowman and pour on some liquid nitrogen, I\u2019d finally have a real answer (not a best guess). Would the mass of the liquid cut through the snowman? Would the liquid nitrogen just run off the top causing no effect to the snowwoman? Would it make the snow person break apart?<\/p>\n
There was only one problem\u2026 I didn\u2019t have any gloves.<\/p>\n
So I sent an email to all the Undergraduate and Postgraduate students at SPS asking for their help and inviting them to build a snowbeing outside the front of Ingram Building.<\/p>\n
I had a fantastic response from the student body with loads taking part and building me sneople* (I\u2019m still going with it) to run my experiment on. All different shapes and sizes \u2013 including a dog, one that I almost stepped on because it was so small I couldn\u2019t see it, and one even had abs. We ended up with so many that I could probably have done with more liquid nitrogen to test them thoroughly.<\/p>\n
At 16:30, as promised, I walked out of the Ingram Building with my LN2 ready to experiment.<\/p>\n
There was a large crowd\u2026 a really large crowd\u2026 like over 100 people\u2026 there were students there from departments other than SPS. It\u2019s rather impressive how the words Liquid Nitrogen<\/em> and Snowman<\/em> can bring people together like that.<\/p>\n The testing began and I discovered that sneople are quite resilient to the effects of Liquid Nitrogen. Their outer layer turns into ice and they become very hard. Most were still left standing virtually untouched. Some were still standing until the \u201ctropical\u201d temperatures of the weekend melted them. Some were torn down by their builders and in a massive snowball fight which inevitably took place after the experimenting was complete.<\/p>\n So next time you build a snowbeing and want it to last longer, douse it in some Liquid Nitrogen and it\u2019ll become all icy and last for a few days extra \u2013 so long as it doesn\u2019t get turned into snowballs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can see more photos as well as the videos of the experiment on our Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n *Sneople: Snow people – no gender discrimination to snow beings.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/spskent\/files\/2018\/03\/20180227_163058-300x169.jpg\")
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