Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back For Your Water

Matthew Storytelling

The other day I decide to make myself a nice, relaxing cup of tea. Crazy, I know. I’m spontaneous like that.

I filled a glass mug up with water, stuck it in the microwave for two minutes (my standard tea-making, water-hottening unit of time), and then busied myself with other tasks.

In response to the beeping sometime later, I walked over and opened the door to the over. I was surprised to see that the water was completely undisturbed, as if it had not been warmed at all. Thinking that perhaps I had accidentally set the microwave for “1:00” instead of “2:00,” I reached out and tapped the side of the glass with my finger, to see how hot it was.

And then: FWOOOSH! The whole thing blew up.

Not the mug itself, just the contents. When jostled, the water went from looking like the placid surface of a calm lake to one filled with 4,000 piranhas and a cow. The water in the mug bubbled frenziedly for a fraction of a second, and then geysered upwards DIRECTLY INTO MY FACE OH GOD THE BURNING!!

Well, no. Actually, it mostly hit the ceiling of the microwave, though some slopped over onto my hand and a few drops assailed my cheekbones. Still, I did what any red-blooded American male would do in this situation: shrieked like a 11 year-old girl at a Fall Out Boy concert and flung myself backwards as if a rabid stoat had just attached itself to my windpipe.

As this took place, Squiggle was behind me, standing at his child-sized table and serenity coloring. I barreled backwards into him and we both crashed into the cupboards, our heads making cheerful coconut-clonking noises as they collided with wood, whereupon one or more of us burst into tears.

The Queen, meanwhile, was ten feet away, folding clothes on the kitchen table. She turned around when she heard me scream, missing the part where the scalding water flew directly into my eyebones and instead only seeing me do my impression of a bowling ball, with our toddler playing the role of Pin #6.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” she said, surveying the aftermath. “What happened this time?”

Fortunately, I had an explanation at the ready. I knew exactly what had happened.

You see, a few years ago I took it upon myself to debunk every urban legend that I received via email, be it about Bill Gates and his plan to give $200 to every person who forwarded his message, the $250 Neiman-Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe, or the dying kid in Albuquerque wanted everyone to send him a postcard. As self-appointed killjoy, I would track down the appropriate page on Snopes, reply to all, and piss in the collective punch bowl (“Actually, signing this petition is a waste of your time. There is no such proposal to slash the funding of Sesame Street, as this URL makes clear …”)

But I was unable to refute one such email–about exploding, microwaved water–because, according to Snopes, it was true.

So while The Queen soothed Squiggle (“don’t cry, it was just one of your father’s … ‘episodes’ …”), I quickly pulled up the Snopes page on our laptop to justify my seemingly maniacal behavior. This is our Standard Crisis Operation Procedure, by the way: she looks after the well-being of our child, I frantically scramble to absolve myself of blame.

A few click-click-clicks from Snopes and I wound up on the University of Minnesota website, which had this to say about the phenomenon:

Overheating of water in a cup can result in superheated water (past its boiling temperature) without appearing to boil. Superheating occurs if water is heated in a container that does not assist the formation of bubbles, which is a visual sign of boiling. Glass containers are the most likely to superheat water because their surfaces have few or no defects. The presence of slight defects, dirt, or other impurities usually help the water boil because bubbles will form on these imperfections.

When I showed the exculpatory evidence to The Queen though, she zeroed in on this passage:

Water can "explode" ... However, it takes near perfect conditions to bring this about, and is not something the average hot beverage drinker who would otherwise now be eying his microwave with trepidation need fear. Odds are, you'll go through life without ever viewing this phenomenon first-hand.

“Hey, that’s terrific,” she said, turning to me. “You coulda won us the lottery. But nooooooooo, you gotta blow your one-chance-in-a-million luck on exploding water.”

Anyway, you’ll be glad to hear that the only lasting effects of The Incident were a small burn on my right hand, a few slight red marks on my face, and a crippling fear of tea. Thankfully, the greyhound has graciously offered to become my new soothing drink of choice.

79 thoughts to “Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back For Your Water”

  5. Now see, I too am “that guy” who gets these ridiculous forwards from people about spontaneously combusting puppies, or Google giving out $100 bills or envelope glue being contaminated with parasites and then I have to go on-line and Google the thing and then reply all usually beginning with “XXXXX, you ignorant slut” and then reference the appropriate web-proof that this is indeed the stupidest thing in the world and thus has made everyone who read it less intelligent. However, this does not detour people from actually sending more in the future, even after I throw in a “DO NOT SEND ME WORTHLESS JUNK LIKE THIS YOU FREAKIN DUD.”

    I think my responses are probably enjoyed too much by everyone on the list.

    Here’s my question, do you also have to respond to the myriad of conservative, bible thumpin, Middle Easter hatin, bashin anything that ain’t like us messages? If I get another email about how some housewife in New Jersey wrote this email about how we shouldn’t care about torturing enemy if it means getting the information we need to win “the war on them terrorists”, and completely forget any sort of international law, I may have spontaneously combust myself.

    PS: I love the site, you routinely have me cracking upa and forwarding your posts to my friends who don’t understand there are great blogs out there. Keep it up, tbw

  6. BreakTheChain.org is also a great place to debunk those horrible “don’t wear wool while eating cheese”, “don’t give your housekey to strangers” type of threatening scare-tactic emails.

  8. I find it interesting that about half the tips in comments are “How to keep water from exploding” and half are “How to increase the explody goodness.” Both are good.

    Incidentally, I prefer to just open the microwave door a crack, slide a chopstick in, poke the heated water with the chopstick and watch the furious insta-boil. Safe and entertaining.

  9. Can anyone explain why water boiled in a kettle makes a better cup of tea than water boiled in the microwave. Isn’t boiled water just boiled water no matter how it is boiled? I’m sure I am going to get clobbered for asking this but since I am a tea drinker I am curious to know.

  10. I had something similar happen when microwaving a bowl of clam chowder. With how heavy it is, a superheated pocket had formed trapped under the surface, and it blew up as soon as I tried to stir it with a spoon.

  11. tsk tsk. It’s “take the water to the tea”, not “take the tea to the water”. But you have been sufficiently reprimanded about the proper procedure for making a relaxing cup of tea.

    I love the scopes.com site too. I have tried it to dissuade the well-meaning soul from enlightening me on various risks, but as other commenters have noted, it has little effect.

  12. That’s the funniest g**d**m thing I’ve read in days. Matt, I love this site.

    @ Matt K above: that’s the first I’ve heard of super-cooled water (well, first time I’ve heard of super-heated water too), but that used to happen to me all the time in these Canadian winters–leave a bottle of water in my car over night, go to take a sip the next morning because it’s still liquid, and suddenly it freezes solid. Everyone at work thought I was crazy, so I stopped talking about it. If only I’d been smart enough to come up with an explanation, and not just walk around the office acting like I’d just seen the Virgin Mary in the cream cheese on my bagel. Yeesh.

  13. Yeti mom, there are issues with heating water in a microwave (such as overheating) which affect the taste. Similarly, you should always use fresh water, heating water de-oxygenates it, causing a metallic taste.

    Try this article for micro vs kettle

    I know you poor people have to wait longer with your piddly 110v (we have 240v from the mains in the UK, it’s actually faster to boil in the kettle than use the micro) but it is worth it.

  14. Sheesh! Now my co-workers know I’m not hard at work — the laughter bursting from my cubicle into a quiet gray atmosphere gave it away. Your humor and writing style are excellent!

    Other comments are right, you know, about the “bring the water to the tea” bit.

  15. I’d never heard of exploding water or super-frozen water (which I think is more interesting, if less fun to watch). And a great, funny story to boot! Thanks, Mr. Yeti!

  17. You can prevent this from happening by placing a small metal teaspoon in the cut before you put it in the Microwave. The surface of the spoon assist the formation of bubbles.

    Our microwave has a little sticker on the inside of the door urging you to do so.

  19. Sorry if I didn’t scan through all the comments, But…

    There’s a simple way, and there’s a trivia fact in this.

    The water flashes because, it wasn’t moved. I noticed many comments to a chopstick allowing bubbles to form.

    This flashing is easily stopped by using a microwave with a rotating dish. That’s why most microwaves have a rotation device in it nowadays. Many microwaves when they were first developed were just the stationary ones. This caused alot of the burns, and so they learned from it.
    What’s interesting to note, this flashing of water is related to alot of what happens in nuclear reactors. This is because…water becomes superheated…in which it becomes hotter than it’s boiling point without boiling. (which is how reactors work; you can look it up online). Agitation causes it to flash to steam.
    This also reminds me (cause of steam) of steam freezing, which is pretty crazy, but can happen, (under rare conditions like the microwave of boiling doom).

  20. Alton Brown had a bit on Good Eats on the Food Network just the other day about the right conditions for water to explode in the microwave. Loved your visual of YOUR experience!!

  21. Putting water in a microwave for tea is weird. Why don’t you just warm it up on a stove? It makes much more sense for some reason.

    Water is what makes item in a microwave heat. The microwaves vibrate the water molecules at their specific rate, which results in heat (ok, I’m no scientist so I don’t know the specific terminology). This vibration heats up the food around the water through conduction. Hence the whole pizza is warmed.

    But putting in a full glass of water is too much for the microwaves to handle, and so it often occurs that only the edge of the water is heated, especially if the plate is not turning. So you might have just ended up with a thin layer of superheated water and that, when you moved it, reacted with the cold inner layer of water.

    I have not read the comments thus far (too many) and have not bothered to fact-check.

    My 2

  22. I also work in a lab where this phenomenon is common enough to be an occupational hazard. The formula: laboratory grade glass bottle + distilled water + preferably DepC treated and autoclaved water. Once properly executed, you too can develop a microwave phobia.

  23. I have been informed mains-powered electric kettles are hard to come by in the US (my parents lived in San Jose for 3 years) and, as can be seen from the comments above, the two main options seem to be microwave (btw Thijs, I didn’t think you were supposed to put metal in the microwave) or stove-top kettle.

    Track down an electric kettle if you can (or care), much easier, put in the water, click it on, wait for it to boil, it’ll switch itself off, pour over teabag.

  24. I see many people upthread claiming they have managed to get off somebodies pure bunk-email forwarding list with a snappy reply and a few quotes from/link to Snopes.

    My somebody is an out and out Christopath, Conservative, Republican from New Hampshire who thinks, honest to g-d, that pretty much everything out of Dubya’s mouth (and presumably Lieberman’s) is the gospel truth. Seeing as Snopes, being the cyber-redoubt of rationality, objectivity and common sense, obviously has no effect on this somebody, any suggestions?

    (I once forwarded a link to this somebody of an Iraqi artist who offered online visitors the control of a paintball gun with the artist himself in the gun’s arc of fire, and sarcastically pitched it as “Your dream come true!”… That shut this person up for about two or three weeks… Help!)

  25. I boil my water in the microwave for a nice, relaxing cup of tea… fresh water, and then I pour it over the tea ball filled with leaves (or the teabag, if I really don’t feel like messing around with tea leaves). No problem there, and I’m pretty sure it works at least as well as the mains-powered kettles. And with our well water, I’d be having to vinegar-treat the kettle every week, which gets tiresome. I use a pyrex glass measuring cup in a microwave with a rotating carousel. I wouldn’t try it without the carousel, especially not with pyrex.

    @Spark, the Snopes method works for regular “gullible spam,” but not so well for real nutcases. My suggestion would be to put a spare email address of your own on the MoveOn.org PAC list and start collecting their email alerts, then forward a couple to this individual every time they send you something. Use “reply to” so you have the subject line from the tripe you’ve just been sent.

    Alternatively, make yourself an email filter and get on with your life.

    Or is this someone you need to keep lines of communication open with for some reason?

    (BTW, I live in NH and hope you don’t judge our entire state based on these emails… though I’d have a hard time blaming you for doing so. The rest of our press isn’t that great, either.)

  26. Mom told me once that I piss her off when she sends something out and I reply with the Snopes links debunking it. I told her that if she’d take the trouble to check Snopes before she hits Send, I wouldn’t piss her off anymore. It apparently worked, now the stuff she sends out starts with “I checked it with Snopes and it’s the real thing.”

    Get yourself a proper whistling kettle. No superheating issues, and it’s fun to watch the cats go nuts when the whistle goes.

  29. That was the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I was laughing out loud when you “screamed like a girl” and by the time you were impersonating a bowling ball with your son in the role of pin #6 – I had tears streaming down my face. Then my mascara started to burn my eyes. So. Thanks for that.

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