Pykrete: Ice Like Stone

Whether plotting to build a great northern wall or an aircraft carrier made of ice instead of steel, the substance you’re looking for is Pykrete. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss what makes this super-strong ice so durable and why there was an actual plan to build ships out of the stuff during the Second World War.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
we're gonna be talking about materials today. But this is
a really fun materials episode that will shatter like glass

(00:24):
in our hands, or will it? I guess it's a
big question mark. Yeah, we're gonna be talking a lot
about ice, but a lot of exciting stuff about ice.
You're gonna learn some new things about ice, I think,
and you're also going to think, uh a bit more
deeply about what can be done and also what perhaps
cannot or should not be done with ice. So, if

(00:46):
you've read any of George rr. Martin's A Song of
Ice and Fire, if you've read that soga, or if
you've viewed the TV adaptation Game of Thrones, you're well
acquainted with the wall. But to reacquain everybody, this is
a fantasy world that based on sort of a medieval
European model, and in the Far North you have this
massive three hundred mile long, seven hundred foot tall wall

(01:09):
of ice that we're told has stood there for eight
thousand years as a barrier against the people's and the
supernatural horrors of the far North. Yeah, it's basically Hadrian's Wall,
except much bigger and made of magic. Yes, yeah, we're
told it was built by Brandon the Builder, with the
aid of giants and the magical children of the forest.
So we're definitely to understand that there is actual magic

(01:32):
in its construction. But also there's this idea that Brandon
was a master engineer, that he's in the vein of
these various engineering cultural heroes that you see in various cultures.
But of course, the real standout feature that makes this
wall unique is that it is built out of ice,
not out of stone, but out of frozen water. Yes,

(01:52):
it is a wall of ice. So um, you know,
ignoring the magic for a second here, it sounds like
a great plan, right, I mean, human have been known
to make shelters out of ice, glaciers and snow have
served as natural barriers to travel, So why wouldn't it
be ideal to construct this far northern barrier, which is

(02:12):
going to be dealing with, you know, with far northern climate.
Why not build it out of ice? Good question, is
a block of ice not just as good as a
stone brick? Yeah, So I was looking around about this,
and uh, fortunately there is already a great book out
there that dives into this very question. It's titled Fire,
Ice and Physics, the Science of Game of Thrones by

(02:33):
Rebecca C. Thompson, PhD, a physicist and author of the
popular Spectra series of comic books about physics. And I
should also note that Sean Carroll wrote the intro. Cool
so she, Uh, first of all, this is just a
really fun book if you if if you're interested in
Game of Thrones and science, I encourage you to pick
it up. But I love books like this. Uh you know,

(02:53):
I have one about done, I've been eyeing one about
Star wars Um. But she goes through very aious aspects
of the books and the world of wester Roast and
breaks them about scientifically, and does so in a very engaging,
humorous but also um, you know, wester Roast loving style.
So so there's there's one section in there where she

(03:15):
tackles the wall and she points out that ultimately this
question would an ice wall work. It's a lot more
complex than you might think. So for starters, there's not
just one type of ice crystal. There are seventeen types
of crystalline ice that we know of. Plus there are
three different types of amorphous ice, and three theoretically, she says,

(03:35):
there might be as many as three hundred different phases
of ice. Uh, you know, depending on some of the
research out there. Right. The different phases of ice having
different physical properties is something that's been explored in science
fiction for a while. Actually, it's in the novel Cat's
Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which invents a fictional phase of ice.
There is no actual phase of ice that does this,

(03:55):
but there's a fictional phase of ice called Ice nine,
which acts as a seed, a stole, and it is
a it's a doomsday weapon because if you drop a
piece of this ice into regular water, it will rearrange
the structure of the regular water so that it freezes
at room temperature, basically killing Earth. Ah, you know, I've
I've never read Cat's Cradle, but I I remember now

(04:17):
that you mentioned. I remember like reading that on a
summary or the back of the paperback or something. Yeah.
But but to clarify again, that's a fictional phase of ice.
There is no actual phase of ice that does that
that we know about. Yeah, the phase of ice were
most familiar with is ice one H also known as
ice phase one, and this is the the hexagonal crystal
form of ordinary ice. And this is pretty much all

(04:40):
the ice you ever come into contact with. And therefore
we can assume that this is the same ice that
we encounter in the world of West Ros. I think
that's a safe assumption. Yeah, of course you might say, well,
what if it's not. What if somehow this is an
alternate universe or a different planet where another form of
ice is the predominant phase. I'm not sure if that's
even a raise noble question to raise though. Anyway, Thompson

(05:02):
does a great overview of ice and the physical properties
of ice, and I do want to throw in that
she has an excellent bit where she weighs in on
whiskey stones. Oh okay, so Robert explained the concept of
a whiskey stone. Well, I do not. I do not
own these, but I assume you do not either. But
I've heard of them. I guess I don't. I don't
know if I know anyone. I think I might know

(05:23):
one person who has them. But the idea is that
you you're such an afficionado of bourbon or whiskey and
you that you don't want anything to dilute it. You
want it cold, but you don't want to put some
ice in there which will kill the drink but also melt.
So apparently these have been marketed before. The whiskey stones
are like our rocks that somebody sells you, rocks that

(05:44):
you keep in your freezer, and then when you want
to have a cold glass of brown alcohol, you put
the cold rock in there, and the rock, of course
will not melt and dilute your beverage. Now, if you
actually enjoy whiskey stones, no judgment of all, more power
to you. But I would like to point out just
real quickly that this is you can get into how

(06:06):
it might be a little bit misguided from a physics standpoint,
but it's also a little bit misguided, I think from
a culinary standpoint, because I mean, I think most people
believe that like whiskeys tend to kind of improve with
the addition of a small amount of water, So like
melting ice cools, but also adds water to the drink.
And this is an important part of many spirit and
cocktail preparations. And this might be why if you've ever

(06:29):
tried to mix a cocktail that is supposed to be
shaken with ice, but then you make it without shaking
it with ice, it kind of tastes wrong. And that's
because one of the ingredients in this cocktail is actually water,
and you have left that important ingredient out by not
shaking it with ice that dilutes into the drink. Yeah.
I've definitely experienced this making cocktails before, where I'll end

(06:52):
up for whatever reason, you know, due to whatever kind
of ice I have on hand, I'll end up with
a drink that doesn't taste perfect. But once the ice
has melted a little bit, it's a different experience. And
even with like a straight whiskey on on the rocks,
I mean that that's always been my experience of of that,
it's like the drink will change as the making drinking

(07:12):
experience will change as the ice melts, which I think
is part of the experience. But then again, i'm i'm I'm,
I'm ultimately a novice when it comes to the appreciation
of fine whiskeys. But Thompson also makes a physics point
about the whiskey stones right right, she writes the following quote.
The heat from the soda is used to melt the ice,
so the surrounding soda cools off. This is also why

(07:35):
whiskey stones are a total sham. Seriously, I can't stress
this enough. Don't buy whiskey stones. If you want to
keep your drink cold without watering it down, get yourself
some water filled plastic ice cubes. They're eighty percent less stylish,
but a hundred percent more useful. Now she continues from
here and get some more detail. Basically, her point is
that the whiskey stone will only take away enough energy

(07:58):
to raise its temperature. Of the whiskey temperature, an ice
cube will take the same energy, plus the energy needed
to break the molecular bonds which melts the ice. Right.
That phase transition takes energy the same way that boiling
water takes energy. Like, why does your pot of water
boiling on the stove not just keep increasing in temperature
and until it's the same temperature as like the heating

(08:20):
element below it. Uh, it's because it takes enormous energy
to turn that water into steam, and that energy gets
boiled off. Yeah. So anyway, that that doesn't directly relate
to the building of a giant wall made out of ice,
but it was just too interesting In her writing on
it was just too humorous to pass over. Well, let's
get back to why exactly it is that ice is

(08:41):
not a good building material, all right, Well, she points
out that quote ice on a large scale is basically
catch up. So yeah, so, yeah, I sent a large
scale is a non Newtonian fluid. In an ice wall
or a glacier, the pressure of the structure's own weight
causes it to creep. And this would occur even in

(09:01):
if low temperatures prevented the ice from ever really melting.
Dislocation small cracks that cause ice crystals to move over
each other would cause the creep even in a you know,
a pretty stable chili environment. So this would be in
play concerning the wall, along with temperature changes. Yeah, that's right.

(09:21):
And creep actually is the technical term there. It comes
up in a paper by a chemist that we're gonna
look at later in the episode. Yeah, she says that
ultimately the wall. She says, the wall would have probably
been okay for like a year, but over the course
of thousands of years, it would end up being just
more of an ice dome or a plateau, depending on
the temperature, So it would be far less of an

(09:42):
obstacle to um certainly intelligent beings looking to invade the South.
Good thing. It's magic then, But but there's more. There's
another huge issue and one that's key to the rest
of the episode here. Ice tends to have a lot
of defects in it due to the way the ice
crystals are organized, and this leads to cracks, And of

(10:03):
course cracks mean that the ice can ultimately fail, right,
it can ultimately lose its structural integrity. And it's not
just that the ice fails. All materials can fail, and
we have to understand how they fail and what conditions
cause them to fail. But with ice, quote, there's no
specific set of conditions that cause ice to fail. Rather,
it fails under a wide range of conditions. Yes, another

(10:26):
way of putting this is that ice is structurally unpredictable. Uh.
You take two blocks of ice that are the same size,
made of the same water, and one might fail trying
to hold up five pounds while another one can hold
up twenty pounds, And that that kind of difference, that
variability is not a good characteristic of a building material.

(10:47):
You could almost argue, I think that predictability is more
important than strength when you're selecting a building material. Yes. Now,
Thompson does point out that there are ways to strengthen
the ice. They're a way as to make it more dependable,
more durable. And the interesting thing is the weird things
that you do to ice, uh. To do this we

(11:09):
find fantastic examples of of this. Not in a fantasy
world like a game of Thrones. Uh. Instead we find
these examples in the the equally or perhaps even more
bizarre world of our own real history. Right. This brings
us to the subject to the rest of today's episode,
which is going to be this fantastic frozen material known

(11:31):
as pike crete or ice that's about as strong as concrete. Yes,
and and again let me just say that if you're
familiar with with this material and it's it's usage and
uh in the project we're going to talk about, then
you know you're in for an exciting time. But if
you haven't, just let me assure you that everything is
about to get far stranger than a giant wall of

(11:52):
ice made to keep undead invaders out. Right, We're more
in the realm of a giant tub of ice used
to bomb knots ease. But first we're gonna have to
take a quick break, but we'll be right back with
more ice. Thank thank thank Alright, we're back. So we're
gonna be dealing with the Second World War here, a

(12:14):
truly global war that worked kind of like a black
hole just pulling in I mean, first and foremost human lives,
but also human ingenuity, and of course funds and resources
as well. So there was more than enough room in
all of this for the occasional hairbrained scheme to pick
up a lot of steam. And this is one of them.

(12:36):
I want to say, I'm not sure exactly how hairbrained
it is, Like in some ways it's hair brained, and
in other ways it's quite ingenious. It's the strange mixture
of of genuine insight and good ideas with proposals so
outlandish that they're laughable in their face. Yes, yeah, I
should I should rephrase. I guess that there are better

(12:57):
examples of purely hairbrained schemes that were brought up during
War two. This one, I guess it's just more of
an idea that this is. This is a real outside
the box idea, and one that at least for a while,
seemed like it might be the best solution to the
problem given the resources at hand and the weight of

(13:18):
the circumstances. Right, So what was the problem that we're
going to start with here, Well, the basic problem was
the Allied forces needed better aerial coverage of the North Atlantic. Yeah.
So to expand on this, I want to refer to
a paper that we're going to be consulting extensively for
the rest of this episode. It's called a Description of
the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and the Bearing of the Mechanical

(13:40):
properties of frozen wood Pulp upon some problems of glacier flow.
This is a report that was presented to a scientific
organization called the International Glaciological Society in nineteen forty six,
and it was written by a guy named Max Peruts.
Now Max Peruts lived from nineteen fourteen until two thousand two.

(14:01):
He was an Austrian born chemist and molecular biologist, and
generally just an extremely accomplished scientist. He won the nineteen
sixty two Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and this was for
his work on the structure of hemoglobin. But Peruts was
really just one of the great pioneers of molecular biology.
I was listening to an interview between Brian Cox and

(14:21):
the molecular biologist Vinki Rama Krishnan, who was talking about
Perutz's work explaining the structure of proteins, and Rama Krishnan
says that in many ways, modern biology would be unthinkable
without Peruts's contributions. He he did some of the most
important pioneering work for the kinds of molecular biology that
are you know, ubiquitous throughout the biology research and biotech

(14:45):
world today. But before all this, Peruts was involved in
the British war effort during World War two, and specifically
he was working with the ice based technology that we
are discussing today, and in this paper he gives a
firsthand account of the project and some scientific discoveries that
came out of it. So to to establish the problem,

(15:07):
Peruts writes that in the autumn of nineteen forty two,
Allied leadership recognized that their war effort was really suffering
from a lack of air power range, especially in response
to German U boat attacks in the Atlantic, and this
was affecting the transport of cargo across the ocean between
Great Britain and their allies in North America. So there's

(15:29):
a U boat threat throughout the ocean. You never know
if your your cargo resupply ships are going to be attacked,
and you could defend them if you had better air coverage.
But how are you going to get planes all the
way out there in the middle of the Atlantic where
the U boats can attack. That's right, you come down
to the limits of aviation technology at that time. Yeah,
and Peruts writes, quote, it had been a common experience

(15:51):
that the carrier based aircraft of the Allies were inferior
in armament and speed to the land based planes of
the enemy. And so what are talking about was that
there were aircraft carriers that the Allies had during World
War Two. But these aircraft carriers at the time were
relatively small, with short runways and limited parking and storage space.

(16:12):
So the kinds of planes that could take off from
them tended to have light armor and wings that would
like collapse and fold up to make them easier to store.
The kinds of planes that were better armored, more powerful,
and could do more damage. For example, I was reading
an article by Paul Collins from two thousand two in
the magazine Cabinet about this project, and Collins mentioned spitfires

(16:38):
and bomber planes as examples of these more powerful planes. Uh,
they couldn't fit on or take off from aircraft carriers.
They had to be launched from the ground. And this
didn't only affect cargo transport and other operations in the Atlantic,
it also had implications for future ground invasions of access
occupied areas in say, continental Europe and an Asia. So

(17:01):
you know, given the existing limitations on aircraft carriers, if
you were to try to land on a distant shore,
your airpower inland would be limited until you could capture
or establish air fields there from which you could launch
these more powerful land based planes like spitfires and bombers
and so Peruts writes quote. It was only natural, therefore,

(17:23):
that a proposal for the apparently cheap construction of gigantic
aircraft carriers capable of operating land based aircraft thousands of
miles from their base was seriously considered. So so that's
the dilemma there, And they're trying to get more powerful,
bigger planes farther out into the ocean, farther from home,

(17:43):
right and that that's pretty tall order right there. But
then on top of that, now not only does it
have to be enormous and also inexpensive. It also would
really help if it were essentially torpedo proof, if the
all these prowling U boats would be in cape bowl
of sinking it, right. Yeah, you don't want to load
a ship up with all of your most important, most

(18:06):
expensive aircraft and then launch it out into the ocean
to be sunk by a U boat. Yeah. So you know,
in defense of of everything that comes after this, that
is a that's a tall order that really invites outside
the box thinking, right, and fortunately we had an outside
the box thinker come onto the scene. Yes, enter English
journalist turned inventor Jeffrey Pike, who lived eight through nine. Yeah,

(18:33):
and so Paul Collins, writing for that Cabinet magazine article
I mentioned from two thousand two, he quotes The Times
of London calling Pike quote one of the most original,
if unrecognized figures of the present century. And I just
want to read collins brief summary of Pike's early life quote.
His career began in nineteen fourteen, when, as a teenager

(18:53):
at Cambridge University, he landed a foreign correspondent job by
using a false passport to sneak into wartime Germany. After
getting tossed into a concentration camp, he fled the country
in a daring daytime escape. In the nineteen twenties, he
virtually created progressive elementary education in Great Britain, all for
the sake of his own son's education. Pike financed his

(19:16):
own school by brilliantly writing futures markets and controlling a
quarter of the world's supply of tin, a ploy which
brought him to financial ruin in nineteen nine. He lived
on as an eccentric hermit, publishing prescient warnings of Nazism
and proposing one of the first media watchdogs. After the war,

(19:37):
his freelance genius helped propel the creation of the National
Health Service. That's quite a resume. So yeah, foreign journalists
escaped enemy capture. Uh weird investment portfolio huge into ten
loses it all eccentric hermit but then pioneers uh progressive
political causes. And Pike was known for having some extreme,

(20:00):
really weird, you could say, outside the box ideas. One
that I was just briefly reading about was that in
nineteen forty three, as a proposal for for the war effort,
Jeffrey Pike got pipe fever and he started thinking, we
need more pipes. We can transport things and people through pipes,
and that's way more efficient than trying to transport them

(20:20):
just straightforwardly over land and vehicles and all that. So
he proposed the idea of transporting goods and soldiers like
from ship at shore too deep inside enemy territory through pipes.
And obviously this would have some drawbacks, especially when you're
trying to ship people through pipes, but in order to
combat claustrophobia and suffocation, the troops that were sent through

(20:43):
the pipe could be supplied with barbiturates and oxygen tanks. Wow. Um, yeah,
that's quite a quite an alternate reality to try and envision,
one in which you would have basically like hot and
cold running um armed reinforcements. Right yeah. Uh So during
World War Two, the British military established an office known

(21:03):
as Combined Operations, and this was to coordinate actions that
required the cooperation of multiple branches of the armed forces,
so if you needed to combine naval and air forces
or army, et cetera. And in nineteen forty two, the
chief of Combined Operations was this guy named Lord Lewis
mount Baton, Lord mount Batton, is a big figure in

(21:23):
in twentieth century British history. He's sort of all over
the place. But Collins writes that Pike presented himself to
Mount Baton's Office of Combined Operations, and he basically told him, hey,
you need to hire me quote, because I'm a man
who thinks. And so Pike was thinking, and he came
up with an idea a response to this problem of

(21:45):
limited air power range in the Atlantic and elsewhere. That's right,
in October of nineteen two, Pike said, hey, why don't
we get an iceberg, hollow it out and used that
as a floating base, because this would it would float,
it would uh, it would be torpedo proof, and it
would it would certainly last long enough for us to

(22:06):
then establish better land bases. Right. So, the idea was
that a platform capable of launching bigger, heavier planes like
bombers and spitfires could be made out of ice and
and there were two approaches to this actually. So one
is the naturalistic approach, where you just take an existing
iceberg and you kind of plane it down and flatten
the surface and create a runway. The other would be

(22:28):
to create from scratch a giant barge made of ice.
But in general, Pike saw a lot of potential for
ice based technology since he claimed that manufacturing ice, even
if you're gonna make it yourself, needed only one percent
of the energy required to create the same amount of steel, right,
which which I mean that's playing into the energy demands.

(22:49):
But also just in general, you have a global war
going on, your resources like like steel and even would
like those are pretty much all already being contested, you know,
like those are needed by to to build airplanes, to
to build traditional ships, uh, munitions, et cetera. So if
you have a solution that requires less energy and none

(23:11):
of the steel that it needs to be used by
all these other parts of the war, Uh, then you
have a potential, um potentially amazing solution on your hands. Yeah,
it would be hugely advantageous if you could make something
like this work. And as you already mentioned, ice naturally floats,
just automatically floats in water, and this is because it's
less dense than liquid water, I think about nine percent

(23:32):
less dense. Also, ice is fairly resistant to explosives. They
had observed this just through the fact that icebergs that
already existed or surprisingly resilient against shelling by ships. Yeah,
I saw that tidbit brought up as well, and I
didn't I didn't have time to explore further. But of
course that just illustrates that warships are firing, or at

(23:52):
least we're firing at icebergs just for fun or for
for the target target practice. I do. Well, Yeah, I
wonder what the re and was. Why were they just
trying it out? Maybe the iceberg was in the form
of a lewd gesture they got kind of offended. Maybe so.
And by the way, about the the idea of being
resistant to explosives, I believe we're gonna come back around

(24:13):
to some more specific stats on this later. Ice was
believed to be relatively resistant to explosives at the time,
but it turns out I think that it's it's more
variable than that. Uh Well, one quick thing about ice floating.
I have Thompson briefly mentions this like this being a
key attribute of ice because imagine what the shape of

(24:35):
life on Earth if ice was heavier than liquid water,
If if ice formed at the bottom of the sea,
that would make that would just be a disastrous blow
to uh, to life as we know it. Like, imagine
how organisms would would function or would failed to function
in such an environment. Well, yeah, I've read about this before.

(24:56):
Also that the fact that ice floats on water and
means ice forms over the top of say, bodies of
fresh water that freeze in the in the winter, or
even you know, I guess over at the polar ice
caps that protects the water below from continuous freezing and
exposure to the elements above. So the fact that that
it floats allows life to continue in water in very

(25:18):
cold places. And also it means you might be able
to make a giant aircraft carrier out of it exactly. So,
so this is something from Collins here. Uh Pike's dream
became this hypothetical ice based ship that would be known
as the HMS Havocook. So I just want to read
from Collins a little bit on the size here. It

(25:38):
would be constructed from quote, forty foot blocks of ice.
His Havocook would be two thousand feet long, three hundred
feet wide, with walls forty feet thick. Its interior would
easily accommodate two hundred spitfires. The largest ship then afloat
was the h MS Queen Mary, which weighed in at
eighty six thousand tons, the Havocook would weigh two million tons.

(26:04):
That's a big boat. And uh and strangely enough, it
looks like leadership kind of went for it. Now, there
would be some obvious problems with a boat that size. Uh.
I mean, we can get into more of them as
we go on. One of them that was mentioned in Collins'
article was that, of course you'd have a problem with
a boat like this, uh, you know, getting advantage sneaking

(26:26):
up on anything, and would probably be kind of slow moving,
hard to steer all of that stuff. But in response
to that idea, apparently Pike said, quote surprise can be
obtained from permanence as well as suddenness. I like that.
I'm not sure I fully get that, but okay, I'm
like halfway there. So anyway, this idea definitely made it

(26:48):
up the chain. Winston Churchill I thought it sounded promising,
and according to Peruts in that forty six paper that
we referenced earlier, Churchill thought that while it should be
a high priority, he also thought that they should quote
let nature do the work. Uh So, in other words, uh,
let's maybe not build something out of ice. Let's see

(27:08):
what we can do. Uh, we can do making taking
advantage of what's already there. And in this this sounds
like a like classic boss thinking, this is a great idea,
but let's let's go towards the cheap version of the idea.
I like that you brought me the expensive version too,
but I really like that cheap version. Yeah, exactly. Let
nature do the work. And I've got a great story
about Churchill coming up in a minute. But just to

(27:30):
expand on on Pike's thinking, this is this is a
great section from Collins quote in battle the ice ships
could put their onboard refrigeration systems to good use by
spraying super cooled water enemy ships icing their hatches shut,
clogging their guns, and freezing halfless sailors to death. Oh man.

(27:52):
In this, Pike essentially sounds like Mr Freeze from the
sixties Batman TV show. Is it more from the sixties
Batman or from Batman? The animated seas I would say
it sounds it's either the Arnold Schwarzenegger Mr. Freeze or
the the TV show Mr Freeze. I feel like animated. Um.
Mr Freeze was like, uh was the ideal balance? Like that?

(28:14):
That's my Mr freeze. Yeah, that that was solid. Whereas
if you're doing if you're talking about something ridiculous, you
gotta go sixties or you gotta go Arnold. So Pike
presents his idea for a two million ton aircraft carrier
made out of ice, and and Churchill is like ice try,
you know, the one of the just crazy things about this.

(28:38):
First of all, this is not something that just came out,
like clearly, this is this idea has been public knowledge
since uh uh you know, at least since since you know,
the nineteen forties, right, since forty six when that paper
came out. And yet I feel like any like weird
alternate history book or you know that say if it's
like um, you know, the Golden Compass or uh something

(29:01):
by Alan Moore. For instance, if someone had said, oh,
I really like this alternate version of reality you've got
going here, but why didn't you throw in a giant
aircraft carrier made out of ice that also shoots freezing
water at other ships? Put that in there, they would say,
now that's just too far, that's just too silly. I'm
not I'm not trying to create a farce here. That's
gonna be in some Kevin Costner Movie of the Future.

(29:23):
It's like in the water World and the Postman tradition. Yeah,
or I guess I feel like there there has First
of all, there has to be some sci fire fantasy
out there that has really latched onto this idea. But
I almost feel like it's such a weird idea. It's
got to be the idea you lead with, you know,
like everything has to be built around the ice ships

(29:44):
of you know, TheBus or whatever the uh your world
happens to be. Yeah, And so unfortunately, uh, this idea,
as as amazing as it is, ran into some problems
in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately the bird ship
never came to be because for for a few different reasons.
One of the big ones though, was that icebergs didn't

(30:06):
rise high enough above the water line and ice flows
were too thin. Because that was another idea, Right, you
go get some ice flows, cut yourself out as you know,
the the amount that you needed, and use that as
the basis for your ship, right, tow them down from
the Arctic. Yeah. And then also further research into um,
you know, the matters concerning the feasibility of constructing an

(30:27):
ice based carrier turned up some of the challenges, the
material challenges we've discussed already. Yeah, to go into a
little more detail on that. So you mentioned the fact
that natural ice just tends to not come out of
the water high enough when it's floating in the water.
Peruts talks about how the Fleet Air arm had figured
out that in order to have a working aircraft carrier
that planes could actually land on and take off from,

(30:50):
you gotta you gotta have a freeboard what's called a
freeboard of at least fifteen meters or about fifty feet
above the water. And the freeboard is just the height
of a ship stick above the water line. Yeah, if
you've ever seen a real aircraft carrier, you'll notice that
it rides pretty high. And this is what you're talking
about with ice flows being too thin, Like the natural
ice flows are just not tall enough, they're not going

(31:10):
to do the job. So engineers were given the job of, well, okay,
we've got to construct a man made aircraft carrier platform
of ice. But there was a sort of dearth of
knowledge about exactly what you could do with ice as
a building material. Pre Existing research on the structural properties
of ice was sort of all over the place. With
its findings. So experiments were carried out in Britain and

(31:32):
in Canada to try to sort these claims out. They
did a bunch of mechanical strength test results and actually
we learned a lot about ice. But part of what
they learned is that the way ice responds is in
fact highly variable and unpredictable, like the way it responds
to explosives is kind of unpredictable. Sometimes it's kind of resilient,
sometimes it gets obliterated, right, and you just you can't

(31:55):
just latch onto the results that you like now when
you're especially not when you're gonna try carry out a
project like this, right. And so there was another thing
they were testing for, which was the modulus of rupture
for ice. Uh. This is also known as flexural strength
or bend strength. Imagine a very simple test. Do you
have like two supports, and you put a slab of

(32:17):
a material on those two supports, and then you put
a weight pressing down in the middle between the two supports,
and for any given material, you see how much weight
a slab of it can sustain of pressure. And Peruts
writes that quote, the average modulus of rupture of ice
beams in bending, for instance, was found to be about
twenty two point five kilograms per square centimeter, but individual

(32:38):
beams sometimes failed at stresses as low as four point
nine kilograms per square centimeter. And this is not good.
Peruts points out that just regular old pine lumber has
a modulus of rupture somewhere around eight hundred kilograms, so
way better in general. And again the ice is somewhat variable.
You might get a weak beam of ice here there.

(33:00):
You wouldn't even know it until you press on it. Right,
If you if you're gonna do if you're gonna build
something out of this, if you're gonna design something built
out of this this material, you need to know how
far you can push it, and it needs to be
at least you know, a dependable range, and not just
a roll of the dice exactly. So ice is just
really not sound as a large load bearing building material.

(33:23):
And so this leaves us around February of nineteen forty
three with ice looking like a bad candidate to build
an aircraft carrier out of. That's right, things look pretty bleak,
at least until they read the work of Herman Mark
and Walter P. Howenstein. Yeah, these guys were working out
of Brooklyn Polytechnic. Yeah, and they've been experimenting with frozen

(33:44):
water with wood pulp inside it, and they found that
this the resulting material, like essentially a mixture of frozen
water and wood pulp, was stronger than ice, significantly stronger.
Apparently Herman Mark had formerly been in Peruts, his teacher
at some point, And I found an account of the
discovery written by Peruts and quoted in a piece for

(34:06):
Chemistry World by Kit Chapman. Uh so these are Peruits's words. Quote.
Pike handed me a report that he said he had
found hard to understand. It was by Herman Mark, my
former professor of physical chemistry. As an expert on plastics,
he knew that many of them were brittle when pure,
but could be toughened by embedding fibers such as cellulose

(34:27):
in them, just as concrete can be reinforced with steel wires.
Mark and his assistant stirred a little cotton wool or
wood pulp, the raw material of newsprint into water before
they froze it, and found that these editions strengthened the
ice dramatically. And I love this comparison to actual building
practices such as embedding rebar steal wires within concrete when

(34:52):
you're making a building, the fibers or wires running longitudinally
through the material helped prevent rupture. But so this stuff,
this mixed year of frozen water and wood pulp, would
come to be known as pike Wrete in honor of
Jeffrey Pike a k a. Pike's Concrete. And there's an
anecdote about the discovery of this material and trying to
sell it up the chain that Collins reports, and he

(35:15):
gets it from the book Pike the Unknown Genius, published
by Evans Brothers in London in nineteen fifty nine, biography
of Jeffrey Pike written by David Lampey, and the story
goes like this. So one day Prime Minister Winston Churchill
gets a visit from Lord mount Batton while while Churchill
is at the Prime Minister's country house known as Checkers.

(35:36):
And reportedly when mount Batton arrived at the house, the
staff informed him that the Prime Minister was in the bath.
You know, he can't talk right now, he's he's having
a good scrub, and Mount Batton was like, good, perfect,
take me to him. So Mount Baton charged into the bathroom.
And then from here I'm going to read from Collins
version of the account quote, I have Mount Baton explained

(36:00):
a block of new material that I would like to
put in your bath. Mount Batton opened his parcel and
dropped its contents between the Prime Minister's bare legs in
the water. It was a chunk of ice. Rather than
bellow at his chief of Combined Operations, Churchill stared at
the ice intently, and so standing by the bathtub did
Mount Batton himself. Minutes passed and they still looked into

(36:24):
the steaming depths of bathwater before them. The ice was
not melting. This is such a great moment and in
in global history right here, Um, I mean it all
and almost and certainly it has to be up there
for like great great nude moments in in world history.
And I'm just dealing with say like that the non
saucy moments and world history that mattered that also combined

(36:47):
involved nudity like this has to be at naked Churchill
in his bath beholding this, uh, this this floating block
of wonder ice. Well, I'm not sure he was naked.
Maybe Churchill bathed in a tuxedo with tales on the
top hat you. Well, maybe, but then we're just in
a weirder territory. But so yeah, here here we have
pike Crete. And I should say that I'm a little

(37:09):
confused about the timeline here because some sources I was
looking at report that the Pike Create thing came in
like early nineteen forty three, but Collins puts this story
in late nineteen forty two, So there might be some
questions about the timeline here, and and and so I
do wonder about the veracity of the story, but I
have no reason to believe that it's fabricated, and I
want to believe it's true. Well on, and I don't

(37:31):
want to dispel this mental image. So we're gonna take
a quick break, keep this in your head, and then
after a word from our sponsors, we will return and
bust open the pike Crete. Thank you, thank you. All right,
we're back. So here we are at the birth of
pike Crete, the potential solution to the Iceberg aircraft carrier problem.

(37:54):
That's right. They realized that this was an avenue forward.
This was a way we might be able to strengthen
the ice so that we could do all the amazing
things that we want to do with it. So they experimented.
Different pulp ice combinations were tried. You know, they are
different pulps, would pulp rocks, other materials put in there,
But they ultimately found that all you needed was as

(38:15):
little as four percent pulp and you would experience a
huge upgrade endurability compared to regular ice. Basically, these embedded
materials prevented cracks in the ice from advancing. So I mean,
basically you could think of it as um um. You know,
a crack starts and instead of being able to eventually
vein its way through an entire block and bring it

(38:38):
to pieces, it could only go so far um before
it encountered something to stop it. So, if you were
going to make a wall out of ice, pike crete
would be a better candidate than regular ice. Yes, yes,
as Thompson points out, it's not that it would make it.
I mean it makes it more durable, and it doesn't
mean that it would be invincible. It would still fail,

(38:58):
but it would fail in a much more predictable fashion.
And and that's also why Thompson ultimately points out that
if your brand the builder brand, in the builder, the
legendary brand, if you're looking to build a giant wall
of ice, even with the help of some magical beings. Uh,
doing something like pike crete would be your best option

(39:18):
for building that wall. Yeah. So I was reading Perutz's
reports about these experiments with pike crete about like the
optimal type of wood pulp to use, the optimal amount
of wood pulp and suspension of water to use. So
it looks like they usually ended up using spruce or
pine wood pulp that's ground up by machines. And this
is the pulp that ultimately would become the pages of

(39:39):
a newspaper in another context. Uh. And then when in
liquid form, this this mixture has interesting properties, Like a
five percent suspension is sort of porridge like, it's kind
of like oatmeal, But I tend to fifteen percent suspension
is more like a sponge. And when you freeze it,
you Yeah, you get this resulting matrix of water, ice

(40:00):
and saturated wood fiber that becomes extremely tough. You can
bash it, shoot it. It tends to hold together very well.
There's a famous story of Lord Mountbatton taking out his
pistol at a meeting of Allied commanders to shoot a
block of ice. Of course, when he shoots the block
of ice it shatters all over the place, and then
shoot a block of pike crete to demonstrate the difference.

(40:23):
And apparently when he shot the pike crete, the bullet
ricochet and graze the pant leg of an American admiral
in the room. Oh my goodness. There are also reports
that the people outside heard the shooting. They had not
been warned, and they were like, who's shooting in there?
Is there an assassination going on? But no, it's just
just dashing Lord Mountbatton with his pistol shooting it materials

(40:43):
to to make a point. This just said, this is
so weird, and it's again, I don't think it has
ever been in a in a film. I had a
I had a Russian history professor wants who who was
fond of pointing out that, you know, you'll see some
movies about um, for instance, that Eastern Front during World
War Two, but you're always going to see the same stories,

(41:04):
the same particular stories told time and time again. When
when there's so many additional uh, you know, it's equally
interesting and in many times strange stories that are spread
out across that entire theater of the war. UM and
and likewise, when you look at like all the things
that are going on during this period, you have you
have stuff like this that just for some reason has

(41:25):
a way of falling through the cracks. Yeah, totally, and
and it still keeps getting weirder. So another thing about
this project is that it had to be very secretive.
I mean, this is this is top secret military research
at the time. So you had people making just big
troughs and buckets of wood pulp mixed with water. And
this is like the same level of secrecy where the

(41:46):
as where people are trying to create a death ray
or something. Uh. They apparently they took out refrigerated rooms
under a London meat market, I think it was Smithfield's market.
They converted this into this top secret experiment. Shan in
manufacturing space for pikerete and Perut says that a lot
of people working on PI crete research had no idea

(42:07):
what this was going to be used for, Like they
were kept in the dark in order to maintain you know,
ops seck. But a few of the things they determined
in their research. One was that an ideal amount of
wood pulp to make PI crete it's about fourteen percent,
so you know, like eighty six percent water, fourteen percent
wood pulp. UH. They also found that temperature can matter
a lot this material. A lot of the good things

(42:30):
about it become less reliable as it warms up, and
so in order for it to have its optimal features,
it really needs to be kept at about negative fifteen
degrees celsius. But if you keep it cold, it is
much stronger than regular ice. It behaves much more predictably
than regular water ice. Peruit says that it gave results

(42:50):
which were reproducible to within about plus or minus, and
the wood pulp actually decreased the brittleness of ice so
much that Perut says that pike crete was ductal and
could even be machined on a lathe. So ductle means
that it can be stretched out into a wire, so

(43:11):
that that's definitely showing you a material that is tough
and not brittle. So he said, we'd come back around
to just how torpedo proof pie create would be uh.
In In researching this, they found that a torpedo would
upon impact, dig in about sixty centimeters and then it
would um. It would create out a four point five

(43:31):
meter area in the pike create. So they figured, okay,
we would need to have a nine meter thick hole
that would do the work. Um and then of course
also to accommodate the aircraft, as I think we already mentioned,
it would need to be like six long and sixty wide,
so huge again, yeah, enormous. So basically this is this
is the sort of durability that would prevent a U

(43:53):
boat from being able to like sneak in, pop off
a torpedo and just bring the whole thing down. Right,
It was supposed to be sort of like a floating
fortress or a floating island. It would just be, for
practical purposes invulnerable, But that doesn't mean it was without problems.
So like, one of the things that they observed while
they were testing the material properties of PI crete was

(44:15):
that PI crete is like other ice, subject to something
we mentioned earlier creep. Creep is again the slow deformation
of materials under pressure over time, the slow flow. So
if you put a heavy load on a slab of
PI crete, it's not nearly as susceptible to cracking and
rupture as regular ice is. But if you just leave
that load there, the slab will probably sag over time,

(44:39):
which is not something you want to happen if you're
going to be parking aircraft on it and stuff like that.
So research revealed times and periods of creep were different
for different substances, depending on you know, the kind of
wood pulp, different percent suspensions and all that. But the
temperature constraint was again very important they need. They determined
that negative fifteen degrees celsius was like the highest permissible

(45:01):
working temperature. If it gets warmer than that, this boat
is going to be in trouble. Okay. So eventually in
ninety three, the naval engineers decided, yes, Pike write is
strong enough, we can make this. We can do it,
so get to work constructing our berg ship. Uh Peruts
reports that they wanted to have a working prototype that
would be ready within the next winter season, and then

(45:24):
soon after that a fleet of them which would be
ready for a possible invasion of Japan, and uh Peruts
notes that too many engineers this seemed impossible, but then
he puts it within the context of the whole sort
of like war orientation, and Peruts writes, quote in retrospect,
this may seem the obvious verdicts, but it must be

(45:46):
remembered that the berkship plan was only one of several
apparently impossible engineering feats conceived during during the war e g.
The atomic bomb, and that the question was not so
much one of absolute feasibility, but rather of whether the
ultimate strategic advantages to be gained by the burg ships
were in proportion to the expenditure of manpower and materials

(46:08):
involved in their construction. In fact, I think that had
not the course of the war and the state of
our armaments changed, the burg ship could have been constructed.
So that's Peruts's opinion. He thinks, you know, if if
things hadn't changed made it not so rewarding, we could
have done it. Just a couple more physical details about

(46:28):
the proposal that I thought were very interesting. One is
that this hypothetical giant berg ship would have had a
waterproof skin on the outside to help insulate the pike Create.
But then also the material would have to be cooled
with artificial refrigeration, right because they've got to keep it
at negative fifteen degrees celsius or colder. So they would
have an air conditioning system on the aircraft carrier made

(46:50):
of pike create to refrigerate the pike create and it
would be blowing compressed air on it to keep it cold.
But the downside is if you think about that, oh man,
if the air conditioning system breaks, then your ship could
start melting and lose structural integrity. Though another good thing
about pike creat as we mentioned earlier, is that it
melts more slowly than regular ice, so you'd still have

(47:10):
a bigger window of time than you would on a
regular iceberg. I can't help but be reminded of the
old There was an old Disney cartoon with like Donald
Duck and the nephews battling each other, you know, like
an epic snowball fight. Do you remember this one? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
And Donald Duck, I believe, builds like a warship out
of ice, and it is he's, you know, devastating his
nephews until they they like they have like a flaming

(47:32):
bow and arrow, which seems a little violent in retrospect,
but they fired that into his ice ship and then
melt it and it like melts into the shape of
like a duck skull. Brutal. Yeah, it's it's weird stuff, Okay,
But a couple more questions about this aircraft carrier, Like
if you're going to take this idea seriously and try
to actually build it. First of all, where do you

(47:53):
freeze it? Uh? You know, remember that Winston Churchill wanted
to let nature do the jaw, but that was his quote,
That was the cheap boss idea. But it quickly became
apparent that this was just not really feasible. There was
just nowhere they could find on Earth where you could
you could feasibly let natural cold freeze this thing in place.

(48:14):
It just wasn't gonna work. So instead they turned to
some artificial construction ideas that would be based in Canada.
Peruts writes quote. The locality eventually selected for building the
prototype was corner Brook in Newfoundland, where I said it
right this time, you did, yeah, and uh and I
But I was more reacting to the fact that I've
been to corner Brook. I barely remember it that I

(48:35):
was a child at a time, but yeah, I've been
to corner Brook. Oh what's it like? Okay, I think
I think I got to get a toy at a
gas station or something there like. That's of course the
only thing I remember because I was a child. But
I remember the name, well, it sounds lovely and it
sounds cold because Peruts said the the average daily temperature
was negative five degrees celsius. I guess this would be

(48:57):
in the winter time, but it could be acted for
a hundred days straight and there you would have protected
waters of sufficient depth in order to try to build
one of these things. Now. Peruts also says, you know,
even though it wasn't made of steel and didn't require
steel like like a regular warship would, it is still
a huge material and investment. One ship alone would require

(49:21):
one point seven million tons of pike crete material. Where
can you make that much? Perutes argues that this alone
would have required a refrigerated plant of something like a
hundred acres or forty hectares, and this would take away
from other industrial needs of the Allied war effort. Yeah,
you can't build that out of ice. You're gonna write

(49:42):
to build that out of out of metal and wood, right, yes.
And so these difficulties we've been talking about, along with
other changing circumstances, ultimately caused the Allies to abandon the
plan for bird ships in nineteen forty four. Uh. And
the other circumstances were a range of things. One was
that there was that airplanes themselves started to get increasing

(50:04):
flight range. Yeah, I just our aviation technology increased enough
to where suddenly those um uh, those distances weren't insurmountable anymore. Yeah,
and Parutes actually says that, uh, it's I guess a
lot of these changes started around nineteen forty two, the
same time this project started. But eventually you could get

(50:25):
land based airplanes out far enough over the ocean to
provide sufficient air cover even even if they had to
launch from from bases on land. And other things were
the acquiring of additional bases on land. So like a
couple of sources mentioned the fact that Portugal granted the
Allies use of the Azores in the Atlantic and this

(50:46):
helped helped them reach farther out into the ocean. So
there's that on the one hand, and then on the
other hand, some changes in airplanes also meant that you
needed even more runway space than you had before. So
it would mean that you could build this six hundred
meter long floating runway, make this huge investment to build
this thing, and then a lot of the new planes

(51:08):
that you want to launch can't even get off of
it because now that's not long enough for them. They've
just got to be launched from the ground still, So
as you're accommodating what kind of platform you can get
out into the middle of the ocean, the planes are
requiring more and more platform all the time. Finally, Peruts
also notes that quote the island hopping campaign of the
American forces in the Pacific had been successful beyond expectation,

(51:32):
and had made an eventual invasion of Japan appear feasible
without large floating air bases. So just in general, in
this short amount of time, the world had moved on
and was leaving the idea of the birdship behind it. Right,
So we never got to find out if this idea
could really be achieved, because it just it just sort

(51:52):
of became obsolete as the war progressed. But there's an
interesting note that that Peruts makes about this project as
a contribution to ice science in general. He writes, quote, Nevertheless,
the volume of first rate data produced within a period
of six months in this country and in Canada under
the pressure of war far exceeded the total volume of

(52:13):
reliable work that had been done before on the mechanical
properties of ice itself. So war, what is it good for? Um? Well?
I still think the song is correct. Absolutely nothing. But
I guess you could make an argument for the advancement
of of our understanding of ice. Well, it makes you wonder, like,
what if we just put the amount of priorities on

(52:34):
regular scientific research that we put that we put on
that research when it's necessary to win a war. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
I remember Neil de grasse Tyson making this point about
about space exploration. He was I forget which book this was,
but he's basically saying, Hey, you know, if we really
want to get serious about about space exploration, we need

(52:54):
to fake the existence of an extraterrestrial enemy, because that
we can get the war machine behind it. If that well,
if if we can get that kind of political and
public capital, uh supporting it, you know, then we could
do all sorts of things. Um. Unfortunately, in a way,
I kind of agree. I guess this is the asymandias
theory from Watchman, right, But um, but I think part

(53:16):
of the problem is a lot of what you would
end up researching was the creation of newer, more powerful weapons,
which are maybe not exactly what we need. Right. I
think we've discussed this before in terms of of of
rocket science under the third Reich. You know, there's there's
often this um sort of fantastic misconception that there is

(53:37):
you know, there's these great advancements in space technology, and
there's oh there was a secret Moon base that the
Nazis had, that sort of thing, that the Nazi space program.
But and really you do, and of course you did
have a lot of of of brilliant minds working at
the time, but like so many other brilliant minds during
this global war, they were sucked into that black hole

(53:58):
of of global conflict. So their value to these nations
that they were, um they were serving, We're we're just
boiled down to warfare interests like, oh, you're good at rocketry, Well,
can you make rocket bring death to this country? Oh
you you you know about how ice works? Well that's
great because we're trying to build a massive weapon out

(54:18):
of it. That sort of thing. Yeah, totally, I mean,
you know, we don't want to downplay that. Like in
in Germany there were actually advances made in rocketry that
were later put to peaceful uses, but the uses they
were put to, primarily during the war were to reign
held down on England and other allies. But so anyway,
that's the end of the historical pike crete story. You

(54:38):
know that that the project came to an end, and
there has not been a lot of serious investigation of
pike crete, uh at certainly not at that scale. Since then,
people have done little projects where people have built structures
out of pike crete and stuff, and and that's interesting.
And in fact there have even been like, uh like
MythBusters and some other TV shows kind of like this.

(54:59):
I think there's one in in Britain called Bang Goes
the Theory that have tested out small boats made of
pi crete. I know in the MythBusters episode they tested
the mechanical properties of pi crete, like trying to drop
it from certain heights and smash it, and they confirmed
the kind of stuff that pruits had already been saying
that like a frozen block of water saturated wood pulp

(55:21):
did indeed melt a lot more slowly than an equivalent
sized block of water ice. It was also a lot
more structurally sound when when dropped from a height of
about six ft, a frozen block of water would you know,
shatter into a million pieces, just like you would expect,
but a block of frozen pie crete would break maybe
in half. Maybe lose a piece here and there, but
it was not nearly as brittle as the water ice alone.

(55:44):
And then in the MythBusters investigation, they actually make something
they end up calling super pi crete, which is instead
of using wood pulp in its you know, very small
shaved up form, they use whole sheets of newspaper frozen
within the ice. And the sheet newspaper pike Cree was
super strong. It was extremely resistant shattering. Oh man, if

(56:06):
you used a newspaper that has really strong journalistic integrity
and it's gonna hold up even more. One other just
sort of popular media thing I came across was that
there is a YouTube channel called the Hydraulic Press Channel.
Have you ever watched this? No, but I'm assuming it's
it's like the old David Letterman bit right where the
where he would put take different things and put it

(56:27):
in a hydraulic press. Okay, it's exactly that. It's just something. Okay, excellent.
I did not know that was a David Letterman thing. Yes,
Oh yeah, there's like the old David Letterman show. They
would do that. Yeah, that's great television. And and I
gotta admit, you know, I start one of these videos
up I'm probably gonna watch it to the end. I
just I want to see what it looks like. So yeah,
and you know why again, it's James Cameron's fault because

(56:49):
of Terminator one. Yes, as children, we watched that scene
where the eight hundred is crushed in the hydraulic press
and it made an impact on it. It burned into
our psyche, and there's just something about a hydraulic press
we can't look away. Yeah, So the hydraulic press channel,
they tested out some PI create regular sawdust pikereate, and

(57:09):
they found, of course, it does not shatter the way
you would expect ice to shatter. Instead, I would say
that it seems to under extreme pressure, it seems to
first kind of melt around the edges and then crumble ultimately,
I mean, under much more pressure than it takes to
crush a similar amount of ice, it ultimately kind of
crumbles in a sticky looking way, kind of like a

(57:32):
crumbly block of feta cheese. Can you picture this, Yes,
they can picture something that looks like a cross between
crumbly feta cheese and maybe like orange juice concentrate. And
so it's just kind of peeling off in pieces like that.
They also they also try some newspaper mush pike create this.

(57:52):
This does also kind of a melt and a sticky crumble.
The pieces are softer, less frozen, and then they end
up using what looks me like toilet paper. I'm not
sure that they call it sheet paper, but this one's
got a really interesting texture. It's worth looking up. It
kind of flakes when crushed, and the flakes are still
they demonstrate very large and strong, so it it looks

(58:16):
like something that would be soft and melt in your hand,
like a piece of butter or cheese, but then when
you pick it up, it's like solid. You can bang
it against stuff anyway. Very interesting material and something that
I think you can quite easily make or make a
version of at home. That's right, I mean, ultimately people
can make their own pie create at home after listening
to this show, and then tell us about how it went.

(58:37):
There was a thing in that Cabinet magazine article by
Paul Collins where he quotes a professor, a professor named
Erlin Schulson, director of the Ice Research Laboratory at Dartmouth College,
and Schulson uh is trying to answer the question of
why modern people don't make better use of pie crete
in the light of its benefits. And he just says,

(58:57):
I don't really know why it has languished in obscurity.
It seems like something that could actually be useful for
a lot of things, but for some reason, nobody's not nobody.
I mean, people have done things here and there, but
it does not seem like it has been taken up
in uh in a large way. So that's the past
and the present. UH we might well wonder about the
future of ice based building. And UH, I was looking

(59:22):
around a little on this and I ran across um
The Uses of Martian ice papered by Charles S. Uh Cockle,
published in the Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. This is back in
two thousand four. Uh Cockle rights quote Martian polar ices
could be used as a shield by human explorers. By
covering a research station with ice, high energy solar particles

(59:45):
could be absorbed, protecting explorers from potentially damaging radiation exposure. Finally,
martian ices provide a substratum over which scientific and exploratory
expeditions could traverse on their way to deep field sites,
and the geographic poles themselves. Martian polar ices have the
potential to open a new and unique chapter in the

(01:00:06):
long relationship between humans and ice. So that's a neat idea,
like the idea of building structures out of ice, and
it sounds like like highways of ice on the Red planet. Sure,
and I think this has been proposed by other people
in the past. Uh I can't remember where, but I
know I've encountered the idea of using ice or even

(01:00:27):
a mixed up matrix of of ice and and other
fibers kind of like PI crete to build structures potentially
on on like asteroid surfaces. Yeah, so there may be
some potential for for Pie create there. Um I was
looking around for some more takes on this, and uh
I came across an interesting concept, the mars ice House project,

(01:00:48):
which is a concept that one at the two fifteen
New York Makers Fair. They have a really sleek website
at mars ice house dot com. But this is a
concept from from search that's uh the Space Exploration, Space
Exploration Architecture and clouds AO that's Clouds Architecture Office. And

(01:01:08):
it basically the ideas too is to have robotic machines
three D printing buildings and structures out of ice on
the Martian surface, and they claim that quote. In consultation
with our team's expert scientific advisors, astrophysicists, geologists, structural engineers,
and renowned three D printing experts, we have achieved positive
experimentation with one to one ice printing and successfully analyzed

(01:01:32):
structural models. Now, obviously there are a lot of caveats here,
related both to the properties of ice and the particular
challenges of the Martian environment. But I think it's really
really a thought provoking concept. You know, imagine ghost cities
made out of ice built on Mars by autonomous laborers.
Robots build structures that nobody's in yet. I like it. Yeah, yeah,

(01:01:56):
just like weird like geometric egglues cities on Mars, and
and and uh. I don't know that they really get
into the pie creek concept as much, but it makes
sense that that could be a part of it as well.
I think part of the secret to this is don't
let Kohagen buy up that city. He can't get in
early because he's not going to give the people to air.

(01:02:18):
That's true, he's he is stingy with the air, but
the ice up for grabs. I guess all right, So
there you have it, pie Crete, ice, Walls of Ice.
I hope you enjoyed this journey. It was a fun
one to go on with you, and as always, we'd
love to hear from you. Do you have thoughts on

(01:02:38):
on ice itself? On pie crete? Have you ever made
pie crete? Uh? Do you just have any feedback on
the various um contemplations regarding like eighties and nineties cinema
that we have touched on. Uh? You know how to
get in touch with this? Joe will provide the details
here in a second um. As always, if you want
to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,

(01:02:59):
you know where to find us. Wherever you get your podcast.
There are a million places to get us out there.
All we ask in return is that if you have
the ability to rate, review, and subscribe, do that because
that helps us out huge. Thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,

(01:03:21):
or just to say hi, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is production of i heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your

(01:03:42):
favorite shows. No no, no