And you thought it was cold in the rest of Canada.

A YouTube video showing a woman in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories throwing boiling water into the air in -30C weather has racked up more than 1.5 million views since it was posted at the beginning of the month - one view is all it takes to see why.

While the woman in the video describes the phenomena as evaporation, commenters have rushed to correct her.

Evaporation is the process by which the surface of a liquid turns to a gas, but what we see in the video is mostly high-speed freezing. The reason boiling water is used, besides being dramatic, is because cold water simply doesn't behave the same way when thrown.

Time to reach back to high school science. According to Chemistry Ph.D, Joe Larsen, boiling water's high energy makes it less viscous, or thinner, than colder water. This means that when boiling water is thrown into the air it forms into minuscule droplets. These droplets present a much greater surface area than a large blob of cold water would. The greater surface area allows for rapid evaporation on the surface of the droplets and then an almost instantaneous change of state into a solid — or as most of us Canucks call it, snow.

Hot water freezing faster than cold water has fascinated scientists for thousands of years. Read more on the Mpemba effect if the phrase "fluid dynamics" doesn't make you want to run for the hills.