January 30, 2024 • 46 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss a handful of novel ice formations and how scientists believe they form.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we are going to be talking about ice. Now.
This is relevant to us personally because down here in
Atlanta we have just come out of a long stretch
of very very cold weather.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
That's right. Yeah, we had quite a cold snap lingered
around for many days there. We didn't get any of
the snow. They got a lot of snow north of us,
and you know, certainly in like Tennessee for example, and
I think parts of northern Georgia, but down here we
didn't see that. Instead, we just got cold temperatures and
we got ice.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I should bestfy it was cold weather for Atlanta, because
obviously we get sneered at by you know, people who
live in the really freezing click.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's right, yeah, So you know, like a lot of people,
it was, you know, it was unseasonably cold. So I
was noticing things that I hadn't noticed before in my
immediate environment. And one of these things, right outside of
the window where we eat our breakfast, we have a
(01:21):
bird bath, and the bird bath was full of water.
I probably should have emptied it because anytime the water
freezes in the bird bath, it like cracks the plastic
at the bottom, and then once everything melts and dries out,
I have to like superglue it again so that it
will hold water. But you know, it's still it's amusing,
especially for my son when when all that freezes up.
(01:43):
Except this time, there was a little something extra going on.
And it's something that I know a number of you
out there have experienced as well. And if you haven't
experienced it, maybe you've seen pictures or footage of it
from other people having this experience. But you go out
to the bird bath, it is of course frozen saft,
except there's this little extra bit. There's a spike emerging,
(02:05):
and generally it's like diagonally from the bird bath, as
if there's like some sort of sentient like death spike
or in some cases kind of a cone or pyramid
or inverted pyramid emerging out of the ice.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah. I've seen this in different forms, often with like
a bird bath. I feel like I've seen it in
the form of something that looks like a like a
vase or Yeah, more like a cone, but I'm familiar
with it also just in the freezer making ice cubes.
Occasionally I think, if you know, if conditions in the
freezer are just right, you'll you'll put in a tray
of ice cubes and you'll pull them out and they'll
(02:41):
have like what looks like, I don't know, the the
outline of a comet impact on the surface of the
ice cube, frozen in time exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, So again, this is a fairly common occurrence, but
it doesn't seem to take away from the novelty of
ice spikes. And there are a lot of explained articles
concerning ice spikes out there, But one of the older
ones I came across was a letter published in the
journal Nature on March seventh, nineteen thirty one, and it
(03:11):
was written by Arthur Morley Davies who lived eighteen sixty
nine through nineteen fifty nine. He was a staunch critic
of creationism and an author of the nineteen thirty seven
book Evolution and Its Modern Critics.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
I'm picturing the Statler and Waldorf.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So you know, learned man scientist and author. But in
this article I was amused because he's doing just what
I was doing, and what many of us are still
doing today, gazing at this sudden weird ice in a
bird bath and just trying to figure out what's going on,
kind of guessing at it, and also calling up friends
and being like, Hey, you'd never believe what I saw
this morning is quite curious. Let's talk about what's going
(03:49):
on here. So I'm going to read just a bit
from it here, he says, quote. I am indebted to
a number of my colleagues, and particularly to Professor Ao
Ramkin and doctor H. T Ellingham for a very interesting
discussion of this phenomenon. The most feasible explanation appears to
be that freezing began as usual at the margin of
(04:10):
the surface of the water, and ice crystals grew inward
until the surface was completely frozen except for a triangular
area in the center. At this stage, there was a
rapid fall of temperature, and the water below the surface
began to freeze quickly. The expansion accompanying solidification caused the
excess of volume to be forced through the triangular aperture,
(04:32):
the water freezing as it rose. And that sounds pretty good, right, yeah, yeah,
And this is roughly what I was thinking about as well.
I think the morning that we saw the ice spike,
we were going somewhere. I think it was like super cold,
but we were like, Okay, I guess we're going to
go to Ikia or something. So we looked at the
ice spike and we got in the car, and then
(04:52):
I was just kind of thinking about the ice spike,
and I was like, well, I guess what's probably happening
is such and such, And it sounds like I was
mostly correct. The oldest writings on the formation of these
ice spikes that I could come across, they seem to
go back a decade or so earlier to nineteen twenty one.
This is when H. E. Dorsey wrote about it. Apparently
(05:13):
another author that is credited as O. Bali or Bally
also wrote about it. Thus it is often referred to
as the Bally Dorsey theory of spicule formation on sweet pellets.
So who's this Dorsey, gentleman, Well, this would be American engineer,
inventor and physicist Herbert Grove Dorsey, who lived eighteen seventy
(05:35):
six through nineteen sixty one, who invented and patented the
first practical pathometer for phathometer. I suppose for determining water
depth in nineteen twenty eight, along with many other inventions,
though that might be the biggest one. He was principal
engineer for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Radiosonic
Laboratory in the nineteen thirties. He studied the formation of
(05:58):
ice spikes in a laboratory setting, and he theorized that
the increase in volume for the freezing ice forced water
up through an opening in the ice covering, creating a
tube that grows at the tip. And this does remain
the most widely accepted theory of what's going on here.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
But from what I understand, the conditions have to be
just right to form an ice spike, right, Like, if
it's either too warm or too cold below freezing, either
way it will it will inhibit the formation of the spike.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
That's right. Yeah. I was reading about the work of
physicist Kenneth Librick, who conducted a study of ice spikes
in two thousand and three and found that there's kind
of like a Goldilocks zone for ice spike formation. You
want it to be roughly twenty degrees fairnheigh. That's negative
seven degrees celsius more or less colder than that, and
(06:49):
spikes don't form hotter than that, and the ice doesn't
form fast enough to generate a spike. Also, the quality
of water plays apart, so pure water, according to this
individual's experiments, seemed to be important. He found that with
salt content he saw a reduction in a likelihood of
ice spikes, and in his experiments, tap water didn't work
(07:11):
at all. Now, granted, tap water is going to vary
from place to place, but yeah, it seems like pure
water is going to be your best option here.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
I think it's interesting that the formation of spikes in
freezing water, that process is dependent on the peculiar fact
that water, unlike most substances, expands rather than contracts as
it freezes. So and you know, a lot of things
actually on Earth and in life in the universe are
(07:43):
dependent on the fact that water expands instead of contracting
as it freezes. So if water contracted and became more
dense as it froze, water would sink to like ice
would sink to the bottom of bodies of water instead
of floating on top, which would you know, radically change
the way life life works on Earth. I think I've
read some arguments before that it like if that were
(08:04):
physically the case, it would sort of make life on
Earth near impossible because like, when water started freezing on top,
it would essentially instead of insulating the water below with
the ice layer on top, the ice would sink to
the bottom, and then the whole column of water would freeze,
and then you know, it would kill all the life
forms in it, or at least freeze them. So that's
an extremely consequential outcome of the fact that the water
(08:27):
expands instead of contracting when it freezes. But also we
get these ice bikes, So like, yeah, like you explained, Rob,
you've got a container of water and it starts freezing
from the outside in. You can imagine it sort of
forms a shell of ice in a way around this
mass of liquid water, and this the liquid water in
the middle. It starts to freeze. It needs somewhere to
(08:48):
go because it's expanding in the freezing process. So if
there's only like a hole left in the surface, it's
going to start squeezing out through that hole and freezing
as it squeezes out and just freezes taller and taller, taller.
For liquids, that shrink in volume as they freeze.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
This would never happen, right, right, So it's yeah, it's
a fun little thing to observe at the at a
frozen bird bath or inside of a freezer if conditions
are right there. So in this episode, as you've probably guessed,
this is roughly what we're going to be talking about,
various examples of what you might call strange eyes, strange
water eyes, and we have some fun ones to discuss here.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Okay, So I'm going to talk about a bizarre, haunting
genre of ice formation referred to as nieves penitentes Spanish
for penitent snows, or sometimes they're just called penitentes, meaning penitents,
So depending on what you read, they're named after their
resemblance either to maybe human figures kneeling in prayer, or
(09:48):
more often to monks marching in religious processions, especially the
kind you might see with like the pointed hoods worn
in Spanish Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. These formations are
so sometimes described as standing blades, pinnacles, towers, or columns
of ice. They can reach up to a maximum of
(10:10):
four or five meters in height in the settings where
they're most commonly found, though I found some claims of
penitents or penitent like formations in other cases reaching even higher.
But the numbers I've seen for the Andes where they're
most often seen are four or five meters. They can
be found in high mountain ranges, especially the Andes in
(10:30):
South America, at elevations of about four thousand meters above
sea level or more. They're generally oriented so that the
blades point toward the path of the sun, point toward
the noontime sun, and they can occupy whole fields or hillsides, which,
if you go with the analogy of their namesake, forms
(10:52):
the impression of a vast, uncountable crowd of worshippers or
of maybe monks gathering at the end of a great
procession or pilgrimage.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, there's some very evocative photos of these. You included
some in the outline. Some of these are I feel
like they're just the kind of thing that are just
ripped from the sorts of wallpapers that come included with
various Apple products, you know, like it's that kind of
like stunning serene imagery.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, exactly so, looking at the photos, I totally understand
the comparison to kneeling or marching human bodies. But personally,
I'm struck with how much they can sometimes look like
a naturally occurring maize with chaotic corridors and pathways that
are bounded by these thin, jagged ridges of ice. So
(11:40):
to me, some of these landscapes and they can take
you know, they have different sizes and orientations and stuff,
so they don't all look the same. But some of
the Penitente landscapes look like a frost magic variant of
a xenomorph colony was using their structural mucous secretions to
approximate a human hedge made.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Is Yeah, Yeah, it does have that kind of feeling
a very alien landscape, especially the case in these images
you shared here where we see human beings standing amid
these blades.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah, and that can create a very creepy feeling. You
see people posing with them. Sometimes they're as tall as
the person or taller, and it's as if either they're
standing in a crowd or maybe standing in a kind
of forest or maze. And the other objects here are
not people or trees or hedges or whatever, but they
are giant, rippling blade like shards of ice. Now, one
(12:33):
famous historical description of these features can be found in
Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. This is a work
we've talked about on the show a number of times before,
but it's the published memoir of Charles Darwin's five year
journey around the world on the British Royal Navy survey ship,
the HMS Beagle, during which journey Darwin made geological and
(12:56):
biological observations which would later form the basis of his
theory of evolution by natural selection. But this book was
from before on the Origin of species. This book is
just full of interesting observations about the world and about
nature from Darwin's travels, and it helps for the reading
that Darwin, I think is a very good writer of prose.
(13:19):
So for context, the time of the entry where Darwin's
going to talk about Penitentes is March eighteen, thirty thirty five.
Darwin and his traveling party are in the middle of
the Andes Mountains, so this is a part of the
journey where he's off of the ship and he's traveling
around in South America. They're in the middle of the
Andes and they are making an overland journey from Santiago,
(13:42):
Chile to the city of Mendoza in modern day Argentina,
and on the course of this track, Darwin makes a
number of very scientifically interesting observations, including coming across a
petrified forest in the barren reaches of the High Desert,
and also discover bring some fossil seashells embedded in rocks
(14:02):
way up in the mountains. Darwin writes, quote shells which
were once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now
standing nearly fourteen thousand feet above its level. So the
entries of the journal I'm going to look at are
from around March twenty first to March twenty second, and
a Darwin's party they've just emerged from a mountain pass
called Puquines and they are headed toward another mountain pass
(14:28):
called the Portillo Pass. And so March late March I
was thinking of winter transitioning to spring. But that's then
I realized, oh, that's northern hemisphere brain talking. This is
the southern hemisphere. So that's actually summer turning into autumn.
So this is I think a late time of the
year to be trying to make this journey. Now, it's
(14:48):
an interesting note. Before we get to the ice formations,
I did just want to mention something that caught my
attention from the journal entry from March twenty first, Darwin
says he and his companions have made their way into
a high mountainous country between two mountain ranges, and again
this is apparently late in the season for travel. Darwin
fears what would happen if there's bad weather because there
(15:09):
is not much there's not really anywhere for them to
take shelter, and he says that they are able to
build what he calls a miserable fire out of the
only available fuel, which are the roots of an unspecified
scrubby plant. And he says that the wind was piercingly cold.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I'm getting shades of Bilbo. Is there about the journey
through the misty mountains? Here?
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Oh that's funny, Yeah, No lyrics of songs are included.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Unfortunately, here does he complain about the lack of food though.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Oh you know, Darwin had to have second breakfast, and
in fact there are complaints about food coming right up.
So Darwin is about to explain troubles they had cooking
their food, which connects to an interesting fact we've talked
about in some of our episodes on high altitudes. In
the past. So Darwin writes, quote, at the place where
we slept, water necessarily boiled from the diminished pressure of
(16:02):
the atmosphere at a lower temperature than it does in
a less lofty country, the case being the converse of
that of a Papan's digester. Now a quick note here.
Papan's digester was basically a pressure cooker. It was an
early pressure cooker invented in the seventeenth century by the
French physicist Denis Papan. So Darwin is saying that the
(16:27):
high elevation at his camp is functioning like a reverse
pressure cooker. Inside a pressure cooker you increase the boiling
point of water by closing it and having a higher pressure,
allowing the food to cook faster. At his camp, and
the low pressure up there, it lowers the boiling point
of water instead of increasing it. So he goes on
to say, quote, hence the potatoes, after remaining for some
(16:49):
hours in the boiling water, were nearly as hard as ever.
The pot was left on the fire all night, and
next morning it was boiled again, But yet the potatoes
were not cooked. I found out this by overhearing my
two companions discussing the cause they had come to the
simple conclusion quote that the cursed pot, which was a
new one, did not choose to boil potatoes. Oh wow,
(17:12):
this pot hates potatoes. So a couple of things here.
First of all, what Darwin says about cooking at high
elevation is absolutely true. We've discussed this on the show before.
The higher you go above sea level, the less atmospheric
pressure there is, so there's less atmosphere sitting on you.
The lower the atmospheric pressure, the lower the boiling point
of water at that elevation. I don't know exactly what
(17:35):
elevation Darwin was at the point he was cooking here,
but the highest elevation he mentions in the surrounding text
is fourteen thousand feet, And according to a chart I
found on the internet, at fourteen thousand feet, the boiling
point of water is about one hundred and eighty six
degrees fahrenheit or eighty six degrees See. Of course, in
(17:55):
a regular pot, water cannot get hotter than its boiling point,
which means there's a lit to how hot you can
get the food you're trying to cook in the water.
And as an experiment, I was like, well, I wonder
what a potato cooked to one hundred and eighty six
degrees fahrenheit is like. So I did this yesterday with
the aid of a probe thermometer in my toaster oven.
(18:16):
So it was a dry cooking method, not a wet one.
Not not a perfect comparison, but the results were that,
you know, the potato cooked to one eighty six fahrenheit
was not good, but not inedible. I would say a
potato definitely should be cooked to a higher temperature in
order to be enjoyable. You know, if I was making
a baked potato and doing an internal temperature, I would
(18:38):
take it to like two oh eight fahrenheit. You need
to take it to almost the boiling point of water.
And this this potato I did to one eighty six
was not fluffy. It was still kind of firm. But also,
you know, it was cooked enough that I assumed somebody
climbing through the mountains would settle for it. So I
wonder if there were any other factors at play that
made it even less well done than my one hundred
(19:02):
and eighty six fahrenheit potato. I'm not sure, But potato
thoughts aside. The other thing I wanted to come back
to is an interesting case of connections in the Burkian sense.
Here denis Papan's steam digestor, which again this is an
early seventeenth century pressure cooker, was actually an important inspiration
for Thomas Nukman and others in their work on developing
(19:25):
the steam engine, showing that the expansion of trapped steam,
you know it's expanding under heat, could be used to
do work. For example, to drive a piston, which you know,
from the right combination of gears and shafts and things,
could you could apply that work of the driven piston
to almost any task, from pumping water to turning the
wheels of a railcar.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Yeah, may you never look at your instant pot the
same again. But anyway, we got to come back to
the ice formation. So we were moving on to the
journal entry of March twenty second, where Darwin says, after
(20:09):
eating our potato less breakfast, we traveled across the intermediate
tract to the foot of the Portillo range. In the
middle of summer, cattle are brought up here to graze,
but they had now all been removed. Even the greater
number of the Guanacos had decamped, Knowing well that if
overtaken here by a snowstorm, they would be caught in
a trap. And I had to look this up. Guanacos
(20:31):
or a type of South American camelid closely related to
the lama.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, they're really cool. I've never seen them in person,
but I've seen some nature documentaries that feature them, and yeah,
they're like they're a wild species, and yeah, they have
a quite noble air to them. Based on the footage
i've scene.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I thought they were cute. Darwin goes on. We had
a fine view of a massive mountains called Tupungato, the
whole clothed with the unbroken snow in the midst of
which there was a blue patch, no doubt a glacier.
A circumstance of rare occurrence in these mountains now commenced
a heavy and long climb, similar to that of the Puquenes.
(21:11):
Bold conical hills of red granite rose on each hand.
In the valleys there were several broad fields of perpetual snow.
These frozen masses, during the process of thawing, had in
some parts been converted into pinnacles or columns, which, as
they were high and close together, made it difficult for
(21:31):
our cargo mules to pass on one of these columns
of ice, a frozen horse was sticking as on a pedestal,
but with its hind legs straight up in the air.
The animal, i suppose, must have fallen with its head
downward into a hole when the snow was continuous, and
(21:52):
afterwards the surrounding parts must have been removed by the thall.
Oh wow, so it's a shocking and vocative scene Darwin
is describing. So again, these are valleys in between the
granite hills. The valleys are covered in perpetual snow, so
you know this is the end of summer in the
(22:13):
region and the snow is still not fully melted. And
Darwin says that this snow, while partially thawing in the summer,
had somehow been converted into a field of pinnacles or columns. Again,
he says it was difficult for the mules loaded with
cargo to pass between these pinnacles, and in one pinnacle
formation they found a dead horse, frozen solid, face down
(22:37):
with its hind parts pointing straight up to the sky.
Darwin says in a footnote he believes this is the
same phenomenon that has been observed by other authors, including
Scores B. Jackson and Lyell, and he says, based on
his observations, he thinks that it must be due to
what he calls quote metamorphic action and not a process
(22:59):
during position. So what he thinks from looking at this
scene is that it's not that the snow gets piled
up like this to begin with and then freezes that way,
but it's something about how a snowfield changes over time,
perhaps during partial thawing. So good question is was Darwin
right about that? It seems the answer is yes, Darwin
(23:23):
did not fully understand the cause, but I think his
basic intuition was right. It seems that for a long
time it was widely thought that snow penitentes were formed
by way of wind erosion, but this has now been
shown to be mostly incorrect. It seems that penitentes are
unique to certain conditions. They only they're especially associated with
(23:47):
the Andes, the dry Andies, but you can find them
in some other climates. They tend to only form in high, dry,
very sunny environments like those found around Glacier in the Andes.
In these conditions, when the surface of a snowfield is
heated by the sun, it does not melt into a liquid,
(24:09):
but instead sublimates, meaning it it skips the liquid phase
transition and turns directly from a solid into a gas.
So the snowfields get heated by the sun and then
the ice crystals turn directly into water vapor and float
away in the air. Sublimation is more likely to happen
when there's already very little water vapor in the air,
(24:31):
so the conditions are dry, and also in places where
the air pressure is lower, for example high altitude. So
the snow from the top layer of a snowfield in
the high andies is sublimating in the sunshine. The question
is what causes it to turn into blades or pinnacles
(24:51):
instead of simply disappearing sort of evenly across the whole
sheet of snowfall. Well, there may still be some dis
agreement about the primary physical causes behind this process, but
according to a good article that I was reading about
this by Philip Ball, the science writer Philip Ball on
(25:12):
the American Physical Society website, which is summarizing some research
from the year twenty fifteen, there is a multipart theory
that seems to explain it well. So one piece of
the puzzle of how this happens was described in work
by Uce Boulder physicist Meredith Betterton and co authors on
(25:33):
a couple of papers in the two thousands, and basically
this factor has to do with the fact that snow
can be heated and caused to sublimate not only by
direct sunlight, so the first time the sun hits the snow,
but also by reflected sunlight, and so any irregularities in
(25:54):
the surface of the snowfield that cause a ray of
sunlight to bounce sideways in instead of straight back up
the sky can cause secondary heating. This might be a
little hard to picture without a diagram, rob I've got
an illustration for you to look at here. But if
you can imagine rays of light are coming down from above,
(26:15):
and if you have peaks and valleys within a snowfield,
ray of light hits somewhere within a valley, and the
snow is very bright and white, so a lot of
that energy gets reflected back off of the surface of
the snow. That reflection will often send it bouncing down
to another part of the valley. Does that make sense
(26:35):
that you can picture all these angles where the rays
of light hits somewhere in the valley, and then they
bounce and then they hit somewhere else in the valley,
and they can essentially keep bouncing around within the valley
so that they eventually get absorbed and converted into heat.
So basically, if peaks and valleys are somehow able to
initially form within a layer of snow, the valleys will
(26:58):
be self deepening because the light that hits within the
valley will bounce back and hit somewhere else in the valley,
and it's sort of trapping that energy within it, further
heating another point in the valley. Whereas the peaks are
relatively protected from most reflected light, the only heating they're
getting is pretty much from the direct the first hit
of the sunlight. So the valleys heat more than the peaks,
(27:22):
and they continually sublimate and deepen. What start as tiny
differences in the surface of the ice. These things deepen
into great rifts and corridors in the ice as reflected
solar energy whittles away the valleys, until we have these
these sort of like mazes of blades. However, according to
this theory discussed in Ball's article, this is apparently not
(27:44):
the whole picture. There are a couple of other mechanisms
you need to add. So Philip Ball's article is summarizing
additional research that was published by Philip Claudan and co
authors in Physical Review E in twenty fifteen in a
paper called Physical Processes causing the Formation of Penitentes. So
the authors of this paper are saying, you need more
(28:07):
mechanisms than just that the reflected light being trapped in
the valleys to explain, for example, the regularity of spacing
and patterns seen in fields of penitentes, because while the
penitentes may look sort of chaotic, they are not random.
There are clearly patterns that recur, and a particular scale
(28:28):
of spacing is favored within one field of these things.
So their paper adds a couple of other mechanisms into
the mix. This is pretty technical, but Ball explained it
in a way that I think I understand based on
his summary. So Ball says, first of all, in order
to sublimate, the snow or the ice actually has to
absorb the incoming light and convert that energy into heat.
(28:52):
And when it absorbs this energy, the interior of the
mass of ice becomes warmer than the direct surface of
the mass. So the layer of snow right underneath the
surface is warmer than the surface itself, and the gradient
between these two layers is determined by how easily the
light is absorbed by the snow, which varies between the
(29:14):
peaks and valleys Ball rights quote. Heat is radiated less
efficiently from the troughs than from the peaks, which leads
to a steeper temperature gradient in the snow within the troughs.
This steeper temperature gradient turns out to produce a higher
sublimation rate, so that the troughs become self amplifying in
(29:35):
the early stages of growth. So that's another way that
the troughs can become, as he says, self amplifying. Once
they already exist, they tend to sublimate faster and become
deeper than the peaks. But the second main issue is
that sublimation of snow depends on what's going on in
the air right above the snow. It depends on that
(29:58):
air right above the snow or ice being very dry.
If there's already a lot of water vapor in the
air right above the ice, less of the ice is
going to phase transition into gas and float away. Of course,
when ice sublimates, it becomes water vapor. So the rate
at which more ice below can sublimate depends on how
(30:18):
quickly the water vapor that forms just above the ice
is removed, is maybe blown away by the wind or
somehow diffused into the rest of the atmosphere. Essentially, you
can't put more passengers in the elevator until some current
passengers get out. So this research by Claude Anne and
co authors argue that it is the It is this
(30:39):
water vapor diffusion principle that determines the regular spacing between
the peaks and valleys in the fields of ice. It
is apparently like when there are patterns of difference in
the diffusion of water vapor from the air directly above
the ice, that these peaks and valleys begin to form.
And then once they do, for the reasons already mentioned,
they are self amplifying. So maybe here's an area of
(31:03):
snow where the air is wetter, sublimation doesn't happen as well,
That becomes a peak. Here's an area of snow where
the air is drier, sublimation happens more there. This becomes
a valley. So the spacing of penitentes is in part
determined by things like wind conditions. If wind blows, it
diffuses water vapor faster, and apparently this leads to penitentes
(31:27):
forming farther apart from one another if they form. And
using the mathematical model established in this paper, the team
calculated that in conditions with no wind, you would expect
to see penitentes spaced in the range of roughly tens
of centimeters apart, which is in fact the most common
pattern found in nature. So these tiny differences in water
(31:50):
vapor diffusion and reflection of light and heat absorption in
a field of snow can, over time, by this self
amplification process, turn into these crazy hedge mazes of ice knives.
And I think that's a beautiful thing. Now. I don't
know if that solves the question of how the horse
ended up frozen faced down again. Darwin guesses that somehow,
(32:13):
like maybe when there was a lot more snow piled
higher up, the horse fell headfirst into a hole and
it froze there, and then somehow that turned into as
snow was sublimated or melted away was removed, somehow it
turned into just like a pedestal, like a column of
ice with a horse sticking out of it with its
head frozen in.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It's hard to picture, remains a mystery, but I love
this whole encounter. Here we have such a surreal landscape
to envision, and then we have a familiar character in
the form of Charles Darwin navigating it and trying his
best to make sense.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Of it on a potato free belly. Yes, you can
just imagine, like all night the weather's bad, He's worried
or are they gonna get snowed in? Are they going
to die up there? And then in the morning he's like,
at least I'm going to have some potatoes.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Nope, And then Gandalf turns to him and says, Charles,
your role in this mission is extremely important.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Now, just one more quick note. I have encountered it.
I didn't have time to fully delve into this and
figure out what I thought of the disagreement, but I've
encountered dueling opinions about whether we would expect to find
large penitentes on particular bodies in space, for example, on
the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. So there was one paper,
(33:37):
for example I came across called formation of meter scaled
bladed roughness on Europe on Europa's surface by ablation of ice,
published in Nature Geoscience by Hoby at All in twenty eighteen.
The authors here say, quote, we estimate that penitentes on
Europa could reach fifteen meters in depth with a spacing
of seven point five meters near the equation on average,
(34:01):
if they were to have developed across the interval permitted
by Europa's mean surface age, so ice blades about fifteen
meters tall, which is fifty feet. Obviously, this would present
some complications if you were trying to, say, put a
lander down in a region that had a surface texture
like this. But then, on the other hand, I saw
(34:22):
that there are some papers in reply to this paper
arguing against the notion, and at least one of them
was doing so by challenging the formation theory of penitentes
that I was just explaining. So I don't know how
well subscribed to this dissenting opinion is, but it seems
like it's possible. There's still some major controversy in how
(34:43):
the penitentes form and how that would affect what we
should expect to find on icy planets like Europa.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I found that many of the I related papers I've
looked at it seems to be there seems to be
a steep drop off regarding like technical details concerning the
formation of ice crystals and so forth. So it can
be a little challenging at times to figuring out exactly
what the experts are are dealing with or arguing about
(35:13):
in some of these All right, I have a few
other forms of ice I want to throw out here.
I was mainly attracted to this additional topic of candle ice.
(35:35):
I know that many of you out there have probably
seen some interesting videos and images online of candle ice.
But candle ice is a subset of rotten ice, so
I'll need to talk about that first.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
What rotten ice?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Rotten ice? Yeah, I know it sounds sounds grizzly, right,
like the ice is stinking and dark and bleeding or something.
But rotten ice is, according to the National Snow and
Ice Data Center, floating ice which has become honeycombed in
the course of melting and which is in an advanced
state of disintegration. You can also think of it as
ice just in an advanced stage of melting, so it's
(36:12):
porous and it's difficult to climb or work on it's
generally considered dangerous for humans to work on or with
it since it has lost or is losing its stability.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
That's interesting. So this would be yet another case of
ice that is weakening or losing some of its mass,
not doing so in an even way, but losing its
mass in a kind of modeled pattern, as opposed to
just like you know, thinning out evenly across its surface.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Right right, And therefore it could be dangerous if you
have like a stretch of this and people are going
to try and walk on it or work with it
in some way. There's apparently a great deal of interest
and concern concerning the impact of this ice type on
the biogeochemistry of the Arctic as well, since climate change
and a warming Arctic will make this sort of ice
(37:00):
more common. Is pointed out by France that all in
the distinct microbial ecology and biogeochemistry of rotten sea ice
on the Arctic Shelf twenty twenty. This was a NASA
ADS publication. Apparently this presents a quote physically and chemically
distinct microbial habitat and it's melting could quote contribute significantly
(37:24):
to Arctic shelf carbon and nitrogen cycling and therefore to
Arctic biogeochemistry more generally, so it's enterally. It kind of
comes back to the same realm of what you pointed
out earlier. I mean, we live on a water planet,
and the different phases of water are connected to the
(37:44):
way that life works on our planet. And so yeah,
the story of ice is also connected to the story
of life.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
No doubt, especially if you're a water dwelling organism.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Right even if you just happened to be made of
mostly water. Right now, I was looking now for more
details on candleized specifically, I was looking at this wonderful article.
I believe that the author and this is John A. Downing,
director of the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Sea Grant, And
the author here points out that candleized leaves long, thin
(38:21):
crystals as it melts, So again, this is a form
of rotten ice. Primary ice that has been formed under
very cold conditions melts, it leaves behind crystals that can
be either vertical or horizontal, depending on wind pattern. And
he points out that horizontal crystals appear darker, while vertical
ones appear white and are typically stronger. There are some
(38:43):
wonderful videos out there of people in canoes or kayaks
churning up these crystals out of the like I mean,
to an untrained eye, it might you might think these
are like slushy waters, you know, like there's clearly some
frozen slush in there. They'll dip the paddle and when
they pull pull it up, there are these longated crystals
that kind of rise up and then fall to the
side almost like I mean, there's almost a sense of
(39:06):
like icy spines parting.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Oh yeah, that's creepy. I just looked up images of this,
and so I'm seeing like a kayaker who's sticking their
paddle into the water and it looks like they're just
like plowing through a pile of hay or maybe needles
made of ice.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah right, yeah, So it's you know, it's interesting to
think of like all these different forms of ice that
can occur at different points in the formation and deformation
and melting or decomposition of ice. Now, another variety I
want to mention here in passing is a type of
ice that is often referred to as beach ice balls
(39:45):
or sometimes mermaid's bowling balls.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Who came up with that name?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
I mean, yea, I mean, you look at them and
you're like, well, maybe this is a mermaid's bowling ball.
Often seeing generally you'll see like a lot of them,
So this is another type of ice that's profiled by downing.
These are formed on cold beaches, and they may be
pure ice and therefore have like kind of, you know,
very much icy white look to them, or they might
be ice covered in sand and sediment. They can reach
(40:13):
soccer ball sizes, so they're sphiracle there. They're just big
white balls of ice, you know, not always perfect. Sometimes
there's kind of like a little almost kind of like
tadpole tails on them. It looks like little spikes. But yeah,
these these are seemingly formed by formed as slush balls.
(40:34):
That's another form of ice by wave action and rolled
up beaches by the tide, and it makes for quite
a surreal sight. I included a couple of images for you, Joe. Here.
Some are there's some in the water, and then there's
some just piled up on a beach.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yeah, it looks like I would not have said mermaid
bowling balls. I might have said, I don't know, e,
lithid eggs or something.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just because of the
size they can reach and I'm guessing the weight, right,
I mean, if you were to pick one of these up,
you might be like, oh, yeah, this is a volumeball.
I just need three holes and I'm going to go. Now. Slushballs,
which I mentioned earlier, this is an yet another form
roughly as vehicle, caused by clumps of slush turned and
rolled in a current. They accumulate like snowballs rolled rolled
(41:21):
up to make a snowman, according to Downing. So yeah,
just imagine again. Realized this canna be kind of hard
to picture if you able the like slush in the
water and you have you know, some sort of movement
be it, you know, the waves, tidal action, and it
just causes these to sort of roll and accumulate and
form ultimately, uh, these big balls of ice. All right.
(41:44):
In the last one I want to talk about here,
this is a This is another novel And this is
another one that I think. This one has pointed out
to me by my wife. She sent me like an
Instagram video that someone had made of someone observing this
particular example. And these are the Abraham Lake bubbles of Alberta.
So I recommend looking up pictures of this, but one
(42:06):
might describe the scene here as you have a frozen lake.
So you have clear ice over the dark blue depths
of the lake, but with strange white disks of different
sizes trapped in the ice at different levels, often seemingly
atop each other, as if in sequence, you know, kind
of like a different altitudes within the ice. I've seen
(42:29):
these formations compared to like a lava lamp before, except
there is no movement. Everything is frozen in place. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Wow, I absolutely see the lava lamp comparison. Yeah, it
looks like a so underneath the relatively transparent frozen surface
of the lake. Yeah, it looks like it sort of
bubbles of wax suspended in time.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah. Yeah, the wax is a good example. So what
are these, Well, they are bubbles, but they are frozen
methane bubbles frozen in the ice. So the way this
works is you have organic matter like tree limbs and
other plant matter that winds up on the bottom of
the lake and that decomposes releases methane when the temperature drops,
(43:11):
you know, it drops fast enough that rising methane bubbles
become frozen in the freezing water ice. I think the
other way to clearly picture it is imagine the water
freezing over at the top, methane rising up and becoming
trapped in these kind of like flattened bubbles beneath the ice,
and then the water around those squashed bubbles freezes, the
(43:32):
ice cap thickens, more bubbles rise up and become trapped
underneath the even thicker ice, and this continues, creating this
multi layered lava lamp kind of appearance.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And I guess we can only see it because of
the relatively transparent surface of the ice on the lake here.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
That's right. That's what I've read here is that this
sort of thing goes on in lakes all over the place,
and anytime you have a frozen lake environment and you
potentially have these bubbles because you have or it matter, tree, limbs,
plant matter, whatever at the bottom releasing methane, and then
if there's freezing going on, you're going to have these
bubbles trapped in there. But it seems to be a
(44:11):
combination of things with this particular lake. So first of all,
there might be like enhance concentration of it for one
reason or another, but also you have water clarity that's
really good and a tendency for strong winds to blow
snow off the surface, kind of you know, enhancing the visibility.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Of the bubbles.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
I see, so I would I haven't seen these in person,
have only seen images and videos, So I would love
to hear from anyone who has ventured out to see
the Abraham Lake bubbles of Alberta, or if you've witnessed
similar phenomenon in other frozen lakes.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
You know, it looks really cool, absolutely does beautiful.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Even yeah, though also so cold, so cold.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
Looking makes me want a well done potato.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
All right, Well on that, I believe we're going to
go ahead and close out this episode, but we'd love to
hear from everyone out there, especially on this one. A
lot of you are going to have examples of strange
eyes formations that we've talked about here, and you may
have pictures you want to send in and yeah, send away,
we'd love to hear from you. Also, there may be
other forms of ice you want to bring to our attention.
That's also fair game. Just a reminder that stuff to
(45:21):
blow your mind. It's primarily a science podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mister Mail on Monday short
form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we are going to be talking about ice. Now.
This is relevant to us personally because down here in
Atlanta we have just come out of a long stretch
of very very cold weather.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
That's right. Yeah, we had quite a cold snap lingered
around for many days there. We didn't get any of
the snow. They got a lot of snow north of us,
and you know, certainly in like Tennessee for example, and
I think parts of northern Georgia, but down here we
didn't see that. Instead, we just got cold temperatures and
we got ice.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I should bestfy it was cold weather for Atlanta, because
obviously we get sneered at by you know, people who
live in the really freezing click.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's right, yeah, So you know, like a lot of people,
it was, you know, it was unseasonably cold. So I
was noticing things that I hadn't noticed before in my
immediate environment. And one of these things, right outside of
the window where we eat our breakfast, we have a
(01:21):
bird bath, and the bird bath was full of water.
I probably should have emptied it because anytime the water
freezes in the bird bath, it like cracks the plastic
at the bottom, and then once everything melts and dries out,
I have to like superglue it again so that it
will hold water. But you know, it's still it's amusing,
especially for my son when when all that freezes up.
(01:43):
Except this time, there was a little something extra going on.
And it's something that I know a number of you
out there have experienced as well. And if you haven't
experienced it, maybe you've seen pictures or footage of it
from other people having this experience. But you go out
to the bird bath, it is of course frozen saft,
except there's this little extra bit. There's a spike emerging,
(02:05):
and generally it's like diagonally from the bird bath, as
if there's like some sort of sentient like death spike
or in some cases kind of a cone or pyramid
or inverted pyramid emerging out of the ice.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah. I've seen this in different forms, often with like
a bird bath. I feel like I've seen it in
the form of something that looks like a like a
vase or Yeah, more like a cone, but I'm familiar
with it also just in the freezer making ice cubes.
Occasionally I think, if you know, if conditions in the
freezer are just right, you'll you'll put in a tray
of ice cubes and you'll pull them out and they'll
(02:41):
have like what looks like, I don't know, the the
outline of a comet impact on the surface of the
ice cube, frozen in time exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, So again, this is a fairly common occurrence, but
it doesn't seem to take away from the novelty of
ice spikes. And there are a lot of explained articles
concerning ice spikes out there, But one of the older
ones I came across was a letter published in the
journal Nature on March seventh, nineteen thirty one, and it
(03:11):
was written by Arthur Morley Davies who lived eighteen sixty
nine through nineteen fifty nine. He was a staunch critic
of creationism and an author of the nineteen thirty seven
book Evolution and Its Modern Critics.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
I'm picturing the Statler and Waldorf.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So you know, learned man scientist and author. But in
this article I was amused because he's doing just what
I was doing, and what many of us are still
doing today, gazing at this sudden weird ice in a
bird bath and just trying to figure out what's going on,
kind of guessing at it, and also calling up friends
and being like, Hey, you'd never believe what I saw
this morning is quite curious. Let's talk about what's going
(03:49):
on here. So I'm going to read just a bit
from it here, he says, quote. I am indebted to
a number of my colleagues, and particularly to Professor Ao
Ramkin and doctor H. T Ellingham for a very interesting
discussion of this phenomenon. The most feasible explanation appears to
be that freezing began as usual at the margin of
(04:10):
the surface of the water, and ice crystals grew inward
until the surface was completely frozen except for a triangular
area in the center. At this stage, there was a
rapid fall of temperature, and the water below the surface
began to freeze quickly. The expansion accompanying solidification caused the
excess of volume to be forced through the triangular aperture,
(04:32):
the water freezing as it rose. And that sounds pretty good, right, yeah, yeah,
And this is roughly what I was thinking about as well.
I think the morning that we saw the ice spike,
we were going somewhere. I think it was like super cold,
but we were like, Okay, I guess we're going to
go to Ikia or something. So we looked at the
ice spike and we got in the car, and then
(04:52):
I was just kind of thinking about the ice spike,
and I was like, well, I guess what's probably happening
is such and such, And it sounds like I was
mostly correct. The oldest writings on the formation of these
ice spikes that I could come across, they seem to
go back a decade or so earlier to nineteen twenty one.
This is when H. E. Dorsey wrote about it. Apparently
(05:13):
another author that is credited as O. Bali or Bally
also wrote about it. Thus it is often referred to
as the Bally Dorsey theory of spicule formation on sweet pellets.
So who's this Dorsey, gentleman, Well, this would be American engineer,
inventor and physicist Herbert Grove Dorsey, who lived eighteen seventy
(05:35):
six through nineteen sixty one, who invented and patented the
first practical pathometer for phathometer. I suppose for determining water
depth in nineteen twenty eight, along with many other inventions,
though that might be the biggest one. He was principal
engineer for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Radiosonic
Laboratory in the nineteen thirties. He studied the formation of
(05:58):
ice spikes in a laboratory setting, and he theorized that
the increase in volume for the freezing ice forced water
up through an opening in the ice covering, creating a
tube that grows at the tip. And this does remain
the most widely accepted theory of what's going on here.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
But from what I understand, the conditions have to be
just right to form an ice spike, right, Like, if
it's either too warm or too cold below freezing, either
way it will it will inhibit the formation of the spike.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
That's right. Yeah. I was reading about the work of
physicist Kenneth Librick, who conducted a study of ice spikes
in two thousand and three and found that there's kind
of like a Goldilocks zone for ice spike formation. You
want it to be roughly twenty degrees fairnheigh. That's negative
seven degrees celsius more or less colder than that, and
(06:49):
spikes don't form hotter than that, and the ice doesn't
form fast enough to generate a spike. Also, the quality
of water plays apart, so pure water, according to this
individual's experiments, seemed to be important. He found that with
salt content he saw a reduction in a likelihood of
ice spikes, and in his experiments, tap water didn't work
(07:11):
at all. Now, granted, tap water is going to vary
from place to place, but yeah, it seems like pure
water is going to be your best option here.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
I think it's interesting that the formation of spikes in
freezing water, that process is dependent on the peculiar fact
that water, unlike most substances, expands rather than contracts as
it freezes. So and you know, a lot of things
actually on Earth and in life in the universe are
(07:43):
dependent on the fact that water expands instead of contracting
as it freezes. So if water contracted and became more
dense as it froze, water would sink to like ice
would sink to the bottom of bodies of water instead
of floating on top, which would you know, radically change
the way life life works on Earth. I think I've
read some arguments before that it like if that were
(08:04):
physically the case, it would sort of make life on
Earth near impossible because like, when water started freezing on top,
it would essentially instead of insulating the water below with
the ice layer on top, the ice would sink to
the bottom, and then the whole column of water would freeze,
and then you know, it would kill all the life
forms in it, or at least freeze them. So that's
an extremely consequential outcome of the fact that the water
(08:27):
expands instead of contracting when it freezes. But also we
get these ice bikes, So like, yeah, like you explained, Rob,
you've got a container of water and it starts freezing
from the outside in. You can imagine it sort of
forms a shell of ice in a way around this
mass of liquid water, and this the liquid water in
the middle. It starts to freeze. It needs somewhere to
(08:48):
go because it's expanding in the freezing process. So if
there's only like a hole left in the surface, it's
going to start squeezing out through that hole and freezing
as it squeezes out and just freezes taller and taller, taller.
For liquids, that shrink in volume as they freeze.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
This would never happen, right, right, So it's yeah, it's
a fun little thing to observe at the at a
frozen bird bath or inside of a freezer if conditions
are right there. So in this episode, as you've probably guessed,
this is roughly what we're going to be talking about,
various examples of what you might call strange eyes, strange
water eyes, and we have some fun ones to discuss here.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Okay, So I'm going to talk about a bizarre, haunting
genre of ice formation referred to as nieves penitentes Spanish
for penitent snows, or sometimes they're just called penitentes, meaning penitents,
So depending on what you read, they're named after their
resemblance either to maybe human figures kneeling in prayer, or
(09:48):
more often to monks marching in religious processions, especially the
kind you might see with like the pointed hoods worn
in Spanish Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. These formations are
so sometimes described as standing blades, pinnacles, towers, or columns
of ice. They can reach up to a maximum of
(10:10):
four or five meters in height in the settings where
they're most commonly found, though I found some claims of
penitents or penitent like formations in other cases reaching even higher.
But the numbers I've seen for the Andes where they're
most often seen are four or five meters. They can
be found in high mountain ranges, especially the Andes in
(10:30):
South America, at elevations of about four thousand meters above
sea level or more. They're generally oriented so that the
blades point toward the path of the sun, point toward
the noontime sun, and they can occupy whole fields or hillsides, which,
if you go with the analogy of their namesake, forms
(10:52):
the impression of a vast, uncountable crowd of worshippers or
of maybe monks gathering at the end of a great
procession or pilgrimage.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, there's some very evocative photos of these. You included
some in the outline. Some of these are I feel
like they're just the kind of thing that are just
ripped from the sorts of wallpapers that come included with
various Apple products, you know, like it's that kind of
like stunning serene imagery.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, exactly so, looking at the photos, I totally understand
the comparison to kneeling or marching human bodies. But personally,
I'm struck with how much they can sometimes look like
a naturally occurring maize with chaotic corridors and pathways that
are bounded by these thin, jagged ridges of ice. So
(11:40):
to me, some of these landscapes and they can take
you know, they have different sizes and orientations and stuff,
so they don't all look the same. But some of
the Penitente landscapes look like a frost magic variant of
a xenomorph colony was using their structural mucous secretions to
approximate a human hedge made.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Is Yeah, Yeah, it does have that kind of feeling
a very alien landscape, especially the case in these images
you shared here where we see human beings standing amid
these blades.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah, and that can create a very creepy feeling. You
see people posing with them. Sometimes they're as tall as
the person or taller, and it's as if either they're
standing in a crowd or maybe standing in a kind
of forest or maze. And the other objects here are
not people or trees or hedges or whatever, but they
are giant, rippling blade like shards of ice. Now, one
(12:33):
famous historical description of these features can be found in
Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. This is a work
we've talked about on the show a number of times before,
but it's the published memoir of Charles Darwin's five year
journey around the world on the British Royal Navy survey ship,
the HMS Beagle, during which journey Darwin made geological and
(12:56):
biological observations which would later form the basis of his
theory of evolution by natural selection. But this book was
from before on the Origin of species. This book is
just full of interesting observations about the world and about
nature from Darwin's travels, and it helps for the reading
that Darwin, I think is a very good writer of prose.
(13:19):
So for context, the time of the entry where Darwin's
going to talk about Penitentes is March eighteen, thirty thirty five.
Darwin and his traveling party are in the middle of
the Andes Mountains, so this is a part of the
journey where he's off of the ship and he's traveling
around in South America. They're in the middle of the
Andes and they are making an overland journey from Santiago,
(13:42):
Chile to the city of Mendoza in modern day Argentina,
and on the course of this track, Darwin makes a
number of very scientifically interesting observations, including coming across a
petrified forest in the barren reaches of the High Desert,
and also discover bring some fossil seashells embedded in rocks
(14:02):
way up in the mountains. Darwin writes, quote shells which
were once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now
standing nearly fourteen thousand feet above its level. So the
entries of the journal I'm going to look at are
from around March twenty first to March twenty second, and
a Darwin's party they've just emerged from a mountain pass
called Puquines and they are headed toward another mountain pass
(14:28):
called the Portillo Pass. And so March late March I
was thinking of winter transitioning to spring. But that's then
I realized, oh, that's northern hemisphere brain talking. This is
the southern hemisphere. So that's actually summer turning into autumn.
So this is I think a late time of the
year to be trying to make this journey. Now, it's
(14:48):
an interesting note. Before we get to the ice formations,
I did just want to mention something that caught my
attention from the journal entry from March twenty first, Darwin
says he and his companions have made their way into
a high mountainous country between two mountain ranges, and again
this is apparently late in the season for travel. Darwin
fears what would happen if there's bad weather because there
(15:09):
is not much there's not really anywhere for them to
take shelter, and he says that they are able to
build what he calls a miserable fire out of the
only available fuel, which are the roots of an unspecified
scrubby plant. And he says that the wind was piercingly cold.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I'm getting shades of Bilbo. Is there about the journey
through the misty mountains? Here?
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Oh that's funny, Yeah, No lyrics of songs are included.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Unfortunately, here does he complain about the lack of food though.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Oh you know, Darwin had to have second breakfast, and
in fact there are complaints about food coming right up.
So Darwin is about to explain troubles they had cooking
their food, which connects to an interesting fact we've talked
about in some of our episodes on high altitudes. In
the past. So Darwin writes, quote, at the place where
we slept, water necessarily boiled from the diminished pressure of
(16:02):
the atmosphere at a lower temperature than it does in
a less lofty country, the case being the converse of
that of a Papan's digester. Now a quick note here.
Papan's digester was basically a pressure cooker. It was an
early pressure cooker invented in the seventeenth century by the
French physicist Denis Papan. So Darwin is saying that the
(16:27):
high elevation at his camp is functioning like a reverse
pressure cooker. Inside a pressure cooker you increase the boiling
point of water by closing it and having a higher pressure,
allowing the food to cook faster. At his camp, and
the low pressure up there, it lowers the boiling point
of water instead of increasing it. So he goes on
to say, quote, hence the potatoes, after remaining for some
(16:49):
hours in the boiling water, were nearly as hard as ever.
The pot was left on the fire all night, and
next morning it was boiled again, But yet the potatoes
were not cooked. I found out this by overhearing my
two companions discussing the cause they had come to the
simple conclusion quote that the cursed pot, which was a
new one, did not choose to boil potatoes. Oh wow,
(17:12):
this pot hates potatoes. So a couple of things here.
First of all, what Darwin says about cooking at high
elevation is absolutely true. We've discussed this on the show before.
The higher you go above sea level, the less atmospheric
pressure there is, so there's less atmosphere sitting on you.
The lower the atmospheric pressure, the lower the boiling point
of water at that elevation. I don't know exactly what
(17:35):
elevation Darwin was at the point he was cooking here,
but the highest elevation he mentions in the surrounding text
is fourteen thousand feet, And according to a chart I
found on the internet, at fourteen thousand feet, the boiling
point of water is about one hundred and eighty six
degrees fahrenheit or eighty six degrees See. Of course, in
(17:55):
a regular pot, water cannot get hotter than its boiling point,
which means there's a lit to how hot you can
get the food you're trying to cook in the water.
And as an experiment, I was like, well, I wonder
what a potato cooked to one hundred and eighty six
degrees fahrenheit is like. So I did this yesterday with
the aid of a probe thermometer in my toaster oven.
(18:16):
So it was a dry cooking method, not a wet one.
Not not a perfect comparison, but the results were that,
you know, the potato cooked to one eighty six fahrenheit
was not good, but not inedible. I would say a
potato definitely should be cooked to a higher temperature in
order to be enjoyable. You know, if I was making
a baked potato and doing an internal temperature, I would
(18:38):
take it to like two oh eight fahrenheit. You need
to take it to almost the boiling point of water.
And this this potato I did to one eighty six
was not fluffy. It was still kind of firm. But also,
you know, it was cooked enough that I assumed somebody
climbing through the mountains would settle for it. So I
wonder if there were any other factors at play that
made it even less well done than my one hundred
(19:02):
and eighty six fahrenheit potato. I'm not sure, But potato
thoughts aside. The other thing I wanted to come back
to is an interesting case of connections in the Burkian sense.
Here denis Papan's steam digestor, which again this is an
early seventeenth century pressure cooker, was actually an important inspiration
for Thomas Nukman and others in their work on developing
(19:25):
the steam engine, showing that the expansion of trapped steam,
you know it's expanding under heat, could be used to
do work. For example, to drive a piston, which you know,
from the right combination of gears and shafts and things,
could you could apply that work of the driven piston
to almost any task, from pumping water to turning the
wheels of a railcar.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Yeah, may you never look at your instant pot the
same again. But anyway, we got to come back to
the ice formation. So we were moving on to the
journal entry of March twenty second, where Darwin says, after
(20:09):
eating our potato less breakfast, we traveled across the intermediate
tract to the foot of the Portillo range. In the
middle of summer, cattle are brought up here to graze,
but they had now all been removed. Even the greater
number of the Guanacos had decamped, Knowing well that if
overtaken here by a snowstorm, they would be caught in
a trap. And I had to look this up. Guanacos
(20:31):
or a type of South American camelid closely related to
the lama.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, they're really cool. I've never seen them in person,
but I've seen some nature documentaries that feature them, and yeah,
they're like they're a wild species, and yeah, they have
a quite noble air to them. Based on the footage
i've scene.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I thought they were cute. Darwin goes on. We had
a fine view of a massive mountains called Tupungato, the
whole clothed with the unbroken snow in the midst of
which there was a blue patch, no doubt a glacier.
A circumstance of rare occurrence in these mountains now commenced
a heavy and long climb, similar to that of the Puquenes.
(21:11):
Bold conical hills of red granite rose on each hand.
In the valleys there were several broad fields of perpetual snow.
These frozen masses, during the process of thawing, had in
some parts been converted into pinnacles or columns, which, as
they were high and close together, made it difficult for
(21:31):
our cargo mules to pass on one of these columns
of ice, a frozen horse was sticking as on a pedestal,
but with its hind legs straight up in the air.
The animal, i suppose, must have fallen with its head
downward into a hole when the snow was continuous, and
(21:52):
afterwards the surrounding parts must have been removed by the thall.
Oh wow, so it's a shocking and vocative scene Darwin
is describing. So again, these are valleys in between the
granite hills. The valleys are covered in perpetual snow, so
you know this is the end of summer in the
(22:13):
region and the snow is still not fully melted. And
Darwin says that this snow, while partially thawing in the summer,
had somehow been converted into a field of pinnacles or columns. Again,
he says it was difficult for the mules loaded with
cargo to pass between these pinnacles, and in one pinnacle
formation they found a dead horse, frozen solid, face down
(22:37):
with its hind parts pointing straight up to the sky.
Darwin says in a footnote he believes this is the
same phenomenon that has been observed by other authors, including
Scores B. Jackson and Lyell, and he says, based on
his observations, he thinks that it must be due to
what he calls quote metamorphic action and not a process
(22:59):
during position. So what he thinks from looking at this
scene is that it's not that the snow gets piled
up like this to begin with and then freezes that way,
but it's something about how a snowfield changes over time,
perhaps during partial thawing. So good question is was Darwin
right about that? It seems the answer is yes, Darwin
(23:23):
did not fully understand the cause, but I think his
basic intuition was right. It seems that for a long
time it was widely thought that snow penitentes were formed
by way of wind erosion, but this has now been
shown to be mostly incorrect. It seems that penitentes are
unique to certain conditions. They only they're especially associated with
(23:47):
the Andes, the dry Andies, but you can find them
in some other climates. They tend to only form in high, dry,
very sunny environments like those found around Glacier in the Andes.
In these conditions, when the surface of a snowfield is
heated by the sun, it does not melt into a liquid,
(24:09):
but instead sublimates, meaning it it skips the liquid phase
transition and turns directly from a solid into a gas.
So the snowfields get heated by the sun and then
the ice crystals turn directly into water vapor and float
away in the air. Sublimation is more likely to happen
when there's already very little water vapor in the air,
(24:31):
so the conditions are dry, and also in places where
the air pressure is lower, for example high altitude. So
the snow from the top layer of a snowfield in
the high andies is sublimating in the sunshine. The question
is what causes it to turn into blades or pinnacles
(24:51):
instead of simply disappearing sort of evenly across the whole
sheet of snowfall. Well, there may still be some dis
agreement about the primary physical causes behind this process, but
according to a good article that I was reading about
this by Philip Ball, the science writer Philip Ball on
(25:12):
the American Physical Society website, which is summarizing some research
from the year twenty fifteen, there is a multipart theory
that seems to explain it well. So one piece of
the puzzle of how this happens was described in work
by Uce Boulder physicist Meredith Betterton and co authors on
(25:33):
a couple of papers in the two thousands, and basically
this factor has to do with the fact that snow
can be heated and caused to sublimate not only by
direct sunlight, so the first time the sun hits the snow,
but also by reflected sunlight, and so any irregularities in
(25:54):
the surface of the snowfield that cause a ray of
sunlight to bounce sideways in instead of straight back up
the sky can cause secondary heating. This might be a
little hard to picture without a diagram, rob I've got
an illustration for you to look at here. But if
you can imagine rays of light are coming down from above,
(26:15):
and if you have peaks and valleys within a snowfield,
ray of light hits somewhere within a valley, and the
snow is very bright and white, so a lot of
that energy gets reflected back off of the surface of
the snow. That reflection will often send it bouncing down
to another part of the valley. Does that make sense
(26:35):
that you can picture all these angles where the rays
of light hits somewhere in the valley, and then they
bounce and then they hit somewhere else in the valley,
and they can essentially keep bouncing around within the valley
so that they eventually get absorbed and converted into heat.
So basically, if peaks and valleys are somehow able to
initially form within a layer of snow, the valleys will
(26:58):
be self deepening because the light that hits within the
valley will bounce back and hit somewhere else in the valley,
and it's sort of trapping that energy within it, further
heating another point in the valley. Whereas the peaks are
relatively protected from most reflected light, the only heating they're
getting is pretty much from the direct the first hit
of the sunlight. So the valleys heat more than the peaks,
(27:22):
and they continually sublimate and deepen. What start as tiny
differences in the surface of the ice. These things deepen
into great rifts and corridors in the ice as reflected
solar energy whittles away the valleys, until we have these
these sort of like mazes of blades. However, according to
this theory discussed in Ball's article, this is apparently not
(27:44):
the whole picture. There are a couple of other mechanisms
you need to add. So Philip Ball's article is summarizing
additional research that was published by Philip Claudan and co
authors in Physical Review E in twenty fifteen in a
paper called Physical Processes causing the Formation of Penitentes. So
the authors of this paper are saying, you need more
(28:07):
mechanisms than just that the reflected light being trapped in
the valleys to explain, for example, the regularity of spacing
and patterns seen in fields of penitentes, because while the
penitentes may look sort of chaotic, they are not random.
There are clearly patterns that recur, and a particular scale
(28:28):
of spacing is favored within one field of these things.
So their paper adds a couple of other mechanisms into
the mix. This is pretty technical, but Ball explained it
in a way that I think I understand based on
his summary. So Ball says, first of all, in order
to sublimate, the snow or the ice actually has to
absorb the incoming light and convert that energy into heat.
(28:52):
And when it absorbs this energy, the interior of the
mass of ice becomes warmer than the direct surface of
the mass. So the layer of snow right underneath the
surface is warmer than the surface itself, and the gradient
between these two layers is determined by how easily the
light is absorbed by the snow, which varies between the
(29:14):
peaks and valleys Ball rights quote. Heat is radiated less
efficiently from the troughs than from the peaks, which leads
to a steeper temperature gradient in the snow within the troughs.
This steeper temperature gradient turns out to produce a higher
sublimation rate, so that the troughs become self amplifying in
(29:35):
the early stages of growth. So that's another way that
the troughs can become, as he says, self amplifying. Once
they already exist, they tend to sublimate faster and become
deeper than the peaks. But the second main issue is
that sublimation of snow depends on what's going on in
the air right above the snow. It depends on that
(29:58):
air right above the snow or ice being very dry.
If there's already a lot of water vapor in the
air right above the ice, less of the ice is
going to phase transition into gas and float away. Of course,
when ice sublimates, it becomes water vapor. So the rate
at which more ice below can sublimate depends on how
(30:18):
quickly the water vapor that forms just above the ice
is removed, is maybe blown away by the wind or
somehow diffused into the rest of the atmosphere. Essentially, you
can't put more passengers in the elevator until some current
passengers get out. So this research by Claude Anne and
co authors argue that it is the It is this
(30:39):
water vapor diffusion principle that determines the regular spacing between
the peaks and valleys in the fields of ice. It
is apparently like when there are patterns of difference in
the diffusion of water vapor from the air directly above
the ice, that these peaks and valleys begin to form.
And then once they do, for the reasons already mentioned,
they are self amplifying. So maybe here's an area of
(31:03):
snow where the air is wetter, sublimation doesn't happen as well,
That becomes a peak. Here's an area of snow where
the air is drier, sublimation happens more there. This becomes
a valley. So the spacing of penitentes is in part
determined by things like wind conditions. If wind blows, it
diffuses water vapor faster, and apparently this leads to penitentes
(31:27):
forming farther apart from one another if they form. And
using the mathematical model established in this paper, the team
calculated that in conditions with no wind, you would expect
to see penitentes spaced in the range of roughly tens
of centimeters apart, which is in fact the most common
pattern found in nature. So these tiny differences in water
(31:50):
vapor diffusion and reflection of light and heat absorption in
a field of snow can, over time, by this self
amplification process, turn into these crazy hedge mazes of ice knives.
And I think that's a beautiful thing. Now. I don't
know if that solves the question of how the horse
ended up frozen faced down again. Darwin guesses that somehow,
(32:13):
like maybe when there was a lot more snow piled
higher up, the horse fell headfirst into a hole and
it froze there, and then somehow that turned into as
snow was sublimated or melted away was removed, somehow it
turned into just like a pedestal, like a column of
ice with a horse sticking out of it with its
head frozen in.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It's hard to picture, remains a mystery, but I love
this whole encounter. Here we have such a surreal landscape
to envision, and then we have a familiar character in
the form of Charles Darwin navigating it and trying his
best to make sense.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Of it on a potato free belly. Yes, you can
just imagine, like all night the weather's bad, He's worried
or are they gonna get snowed in? Are they going
to die up there? And then in the morning he's like,
at least I'm going to have some potatoes.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Nope, And then Gandalf turns to him and says, Charles,
your role in this mission is extremely important.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Now, just one more quick note. I have encountered it.
I didn't have time to fully delve into this and
figure out what I thought of the disagreement, but I've
encountered dueling opinions about whether we would expect to find
large penitentes on particular bodies in space, for example, on
the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. So there was one paper,
(33:37):
for example I came across called formation of meter scaled
bladed roughness on Europe on Europa's surface by ablation of ice,
published in Nature Geoscience by Hoby at All in twenty eighteen.
The authors here say, quote, we estimate that penitentes on
Europa could reach fifteen meters in depth with a spacing
of seven point five meters near the equation on average,
(34:01):
if they were to have developed across the interval permitted
by Europa's mean surface age, so ice blades about fifteen
meters tall, which is fifty feet. Obviously, this would present
some complications if you were trying to, say, put a
lander down in a region that had a surface texture
like this. But then, on the other hand, I saw
(34:22):
that there are some papers in reply to this paper
arguing against the notion, and at least one of them
was doing so by challenging the formation theory of penitentes
that I was just explaining. So I don't know how
well subscribed to this dissenting opinion is, but it seems
like it's possible. There's still some major controversy in how
(34:43):
the penitentes form and how that would affect what we
should expect to find on icy planets like Europa.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I found that many of the I related papers I've
looked at it seems to be there seems to be
a steep drop off regarding like technical details concerning the
formation of ice crystals and so forth. So it can
be a little challenging at times to figuring out exactly
what the experts are are dealing with or arguing about
(35:13):
in some of these All right, I have a few
other forms of ice I want to throw out here.
I was mainly attracted to this additional topic of candle ice.
(35:35):
I know that many of you out there have probably
seen some interesting videos and images online of candle ice.
But candle ice is a subset of rotten ice, so
I'll need to talk about that first.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
What rotten ice?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Rotten ice? Yeah, I know it sounds sounds grizzly, right,
like the ice is stinking and dark and bleeding or something.
But rotten ice is, according to the National Snow and
Ice Data Center, floating ice which has become honeycombed in
the course of melting and which is in an advanced
state of disintegration. You can also think of it as
ice just in an advanced stage of melting, so it's
(36:12):
porous and it's difficult to climb or work on it's
generally considered dangerous for humans to work on or with
it since it has lost or is losing its stability.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
That's interesting. So this would be yet another case of
ice that is weakening or losing some of its mass,
not doing so in an even way, but losing its
mass in a kind of modeled pattern, as opposed to
just like you know, thinning out evenly across its surface.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Right right, And therefore it could be dangerous if you
have like a stretch of this and people are going
to try and walk on it or work with it
in some way. There's apparently a great deal of interest
and concern concerning the impact of this ice type on
the biogeochemistry of the Arctic as well, since climate change
and a warming Arctic will make this sort of ice
(37:00):
more common. Is pointed out by France that all in
the distinct microbial ecology and biogeochemistry of rotten sea ice
on the Arctic Shelf twenty twenty. This was a NASA
ADS publication. Apparently this presents a quote physically and chemically
distinct microbial habitat and it's melting could quote contribute significantly
(37:24):
to Arctic shelf carbon and nitrogen cycling and therefore to
Arctic biogeochemistry more generally, so it's enterally. It kind of
comes back to the same realm of what you pointed
out earlier. I mean, we live on a water planet,
and the different phases of water are connected to the
(37:44):
way that life works on our planet. And so yeah,
the story of ice is also connected to the story
of life.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
No doubt, especially if you're a water dwelling organism.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Right even if you just happened to be made of
mostly water. Right now, I was looking now for more
details on candleized specifically, I was looking at this wonderful article.
I believe that the author and this is John A. Downing,
director of the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Sea Grant, And
the author here points out that candleized leaves long, thin
(38:21):
crystals as it melts, So again, this is a form
of rotten ice. Primary ice that has been formed under
very cold conditions melts, it leaves behind crystals that can
be either vertical or horizontal, depending on wind pattern. And
he points out that horizontal crystals appear darker, while vertical
ones appear white and are typically stronger. There are some
(38:43):
wonderful videos out there of people in canoes or kayaks
churning up these crystals out of the like I mean,
to an untrained eye, it might you might think these
are like slushy waters, you know, like there's clearly some
frozen slush in there. They'll dip the paddle and when
they pull pull it up, there are these longated crystals
that kind of rise up and then fall to the
side almost like I mean, there's almost a sense of
(39:06):
like icy spines parting.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Oh yeah, that's creepy. I just looked up images of this,
and so I'm seeing like a kayaker who's sticking their
paddle into the water and it looks like they're just
like plowing through a pile of hay or maybe needles
made of ice.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah right, yeah, So it's you know, it's interesting to
think of like all these different forms of ice that
can occur at different points in the formation and deformation
and melting or decomposition of ice. Now, another variety I
want to mention here in passing is a type of
ice that is often referred to as beach ice balls
(39:45):
or sometimes mermaid's bowling balls.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Who came up with that name?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
I mean, yea, I mean, you look at them and
you're like, well, maybe this is a mermaid's bowling ball.
Often seeing generally you'll see like a lot of them,
So this is another type of ice that's profiled by downing.
These are formed on cold beaches, and they may be
pure ice and therefore have like kind of, you know,
very much icy white look to them, or they might
be ice covered in sand and sediment. They can reach
(40:13):
soccer ball sizes, so they're sphiracle there. They're just big
white balls of ice, you know, not always perfect. Sometimes
there's kind of like a little almost kind of like
tadpole tails on them. It looks like little spikes. But yeah,
these these are seemingly formed by formed as slush balls.
(40:34):
That's another form of ice by wave action and rolled
up beaches by the tide, and it makes for quite
a surreal sight. I included a couple of images for you, Joe. Here.
Some are there's some in the water, and then there's
some just piled up on a beach.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yeah, it looks like I would not have said mermaid
bowling balls. I might have said, I don't know, e,
lithid eggs or something.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just because of the
size they can reach and I'm guessing the weight, right,
I mean, if you were to pick one of these up,
you might be like, oh, yeah, this is a volumeball.
I just need three holes and I'm going to go. Now. Slushballs,
which I mentioned earlier, this is an yet another form
roughly as vehicle, caused by clumps of slush turned and
rolled in a current. They accumulate like snowballs rolled rolled
(41:21):
up to make a snowman, according to Downing. So yeah,
just imagine again. Realized this canna be kind of hard
to picture if you able the like slush in the
water and you have you know, some sort of movement
be it, you know, the waves, tidal action, and it
just causes these to sort of roll and accumulate and
form ultimately, uh, these big balls of ice. All right.
(41:44):
In the last one I want to talk about here,
this is a This is another novel And this is
another one that I think. This one has pointed out
to me by my wife. She sent me like an
Instagram video that someone had made of someone observing this
particular example. And these are the Abraham Lake bubbles of Alberta.
So I recommend looking up pictures of this, but one
(42:06):
might describe the scene here as you have a frozen lake.
So you have clear ice over the dark blue depths
of the lake, but with strange white disks of different
sizes trapped in the ice at different levels, often seemingly
atop each other, as if in sequence, you know, kind
of like a different altitudes within the ice. I've seen
(42:29):
these formations compared to like a lava lamp before, except
there is no movement. Everything is frozen in place. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Wow, I absolutely see the lava lamp comparison. Yeah, it
looks like a so underneath the relatively transparent frozen surface
of the lake. Yeah, it looks like it sort of
bubbles of wax suspended in time.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah. Yeah, the wax is a good example. So what
are these, Well, they are bubbles, but they are frozen
methane bubbles frozen in the ice. So the way this
works is you have organic matter like tree limbs and
other plant matter that winds up on the bottom of
the lake and that decomposes releases methane when the temperature drops,
(43:11):
you know, it drops fast enough that rising methane bubbles
become frozen in the freezing water ice. I think the
other way to clearly picture it is imagine the water
freezing over at the top, methane rising up and becoming
trapped in these kind of like flattened bubbles beneath the ice,
and then the water around those squashed bubbles freezes, the
(43:32):
ice cap thickens, more bubbles rise up and become trapped
underneath the even thicker ice, and this continues, creating this
multi layered lava lamp kind of appearance.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And I guess we can only see it because of
the relatively transparent surface of the ice on the lake here.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
That's right. That's what I've read here is that this
sort of thing goes on in lakes all over the place,
and anytime you have a frozen lake environment and you
potentially have these bubbles because you have or it matter, tree, limbs,
plant matter, whatever at the bottom releasing methane, and then
if there's freezing going on, you're going to have these
bubbles trapped in there. But it seems to be a
(44:11):
combination of things with this particular lake. So first of all,
there might be like enhance concentration of it for one
reason or another, but also you have water clarity that's
really good and a tendency for strong winds to blow
snow off the surface, kind of you know, enhancing the visibility.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Of the bubbles.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
I see, so I would I haven't seen these in person,
have only seen images and videos, So I would love
to hear from anyone who has ventured out to see
the Abraham Lake bubbles of Alberta, or if you've witnessed
similar phenomenon in other frozen lakes.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
You know, it looks really cool, absolutely does beautiful.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Even yeah, though also so cold, so cold.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
Looking makes me want a well done potato.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
All right, Well on that, I believe we're going to
go ahead and close out this episode, but we'd love to
hear from everyone out there, especially on this one. A
lot of you are going to have examples of strange
eyes formations that we've talked about here, and you may
have pictures you want to send in and yeah, send away,
we'd love to hear from you. Also, there may be
other forms of ice you want to bring to our attention.
That's also fair game. Just a reminder that stuff to
(45:21):
blow your mind. It's primarily a science podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mister Mail on Monday short
form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
1. The Podium
The Podium: An NBC Olympic and Paralympic podcast. Join us for insider coverage during the intense competition at the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the run-up to the Opening Ceremony, we’ll bring you deep into the stories and events that have you know and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget.
2. In The Village
In The Village will take you into the most exclusive areas of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to explore the daily life of athletes, complete with all the funny, mundane and unexpected things you learn off the field of play. Join Elizabeth Beisel as she sits down with Olympians each day in Paris.
3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2024 Olympics.