By slowly lowering a glass plate through a heater and into cold water, a crack is formed whose tip stays ahead of the water line and whose path depends upon the dipping velocity and the temperature difference between the heater and the water. Crack morphology changes from straight to oscillatory to branching as the temperature difference is increased. Calculations of thermal stress induced crack growth for a single crack exhibit both oscillatory and crack branching. Due to unrealistically high dipping speeds in the calculations, branching tends to be favored more than in the experiments. Nevertheless, computations successfully reproduce many features of the crack behavior.
