There are a lot of things tea is good for. It can soothe your throat, keep you awake, lull you to sleep, oxidize your body and just be an all around delicious beverage to sip on. But one thing you probably didn’t know tea was good for is as the subject of a breathtaking photo that defies how we normally picture the liquid concoction. Photographer Michael Davies captured the stunning moment of hot tea being thrown into the Arctic air and it immediately turning into a beautiful array of icy mist.
The science behind this is actually quite simple – when the temperature is cold enough, hot (and even boiling) water that is thrown into the air immediately turns into ice. Davies enlisted a friend to throw his piping hot tea from a thermos into the air where the temperature was -40 degrees Celsius. For those of you Americans who aren’t up on the Celsius measurement, that temperature is actually the same in Fahrenheit when converted. Bottom line: it was cold!
Davies himself is a resident of a community of Pangnirtung, an Inuit hamlet located on Canada’s Baffin Island. Temperatures normally hover between -25 and -35 degrees Celsius, so it was an especially frigid day that yielded these mesmerizing photos. The brutally cold temperatures weren’t the only thing that made the shoot a difficult one – the area only receives about two and half hours of sunlight a day, making lighting and staging the shot quite the hassle.
Keeping a particular eye out on the temperature and waiting around for the wind to calm down to avoid any potential burns, Davies’ friend tossed multiple thermos full of scalding hot tea into the air in order to get the shoot picture perfect. After all, to get the best shot, you gotta come prepared with a fully loaded arsenal of tea. To capture that warm and lucid pink lighting, Davies ascended to the very top of a mountain where the sun would set and crest. Though he may have had to bare some bitter conditions, tea has never looked so cool.
All images are property of Michael H. Davies