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Part of it is molten (above the plug), part of it is frozen (the plug).

Think pipes in a house in winter, where one little part of the pipe gets frozen while the rest of the pipes have liquid water in them.



And in Spring, when the broken pipe plugged with solid molten ice thaws, your house's molten ice circuit performs an emergency evacuation into the yard, saving you from the convenience of adequate molten ice pressure


Water is actually a very unusual substance in that it expands upon freezing. (Plutonium being another)

Most materials instead contract when freezing.


Hah! Well, we usually think of salt in the solid state (i.e. frozen) and not in the liquid state, so it's not so strange to be explicit in this case. For H2O, we do have pretty common encounters with three of its phase states, so there's less need to be explicit (or, rather, we have separate words for each state: steam, water, ice).




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