All mysteries
Mystery #1Tier 2-3heat / energy

How does a fridge make the inside cold when there is no ice or snow in it?

Open the fridge and a wave of cool air rolls out over your feet. But there is no ice inside, no snow, no frozen block, nothing that is obviously cold at all. Everything looks perfectly ordinary. So where is all that cold actually coming from?

An open fridge lighting up a dark kitchen, its shelves full of milk, cheese, tomatoes and oranges
Photo: W.carter · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Your guess

What's your hunch? Where does the cold inside a fridge come from?

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