February 1, 2024 • 44 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 -- as well as some other STBYM angles on ice.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with
part two of our look at Strange Ice. Now, initially
we didn't know this was going to be a two
part series. Last time, we looked at odd ice formations
that can occur on Earth, such as the main one
I looked at was this thing called nieves penitentes or
just penitentes, which are these very strange sort of blades
(00:39):
or spikes or pinnacles of ice that you can sometimes
find in high mountain ranges, especially in the dry Andies.
And we looked at a historical anecdote of Charles Darwin
trekking across the Andes and coming across a field of
these things, one that had a horse frozen inside it.
But we also looked at ice formations such as ball ice,
(01:01):
candle ice, rotten ice, and a lot of other creepy, interesting,
physically counterintuitive ways that ice can form or decompose. And
so we're coming back today to talk some more about
strange ice.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, I guess this episode's kind of a release valve.
From the last episode, there were a number of threads
that had come up in our research that we just
had to continue to pursue. So some of these are
definitely still going to deal with direct examples of ice
manifesting in a way that we might think of as weird,
behaving in a way that some people might think of
(01:36):
as weird. But we'll also get into some I thought
very fascinating and haunting folk traditions concerning the ice. All right,
what have you got, rob, So in the last episode
we discussed mostly in passing the dangers of ice, specifically
coastal sea ice and any sort of icy environment that
humans will attempt to traverse or in any way exploit
(02:00):
for hunting, fishing, recreation, scientific purposes. Specifically thinking about rotten ice,
you know the idea that it's just not safe to
venture upon. And I imagine we have plenty of listeners
out there who grew up in places with icy environments
who can attest to the dangers of ice that I mean,
there are just so many ways that it can potentially
(02:20):
be dangerous. There's, of course, you know the fact that
ice can be slippery, you can fall, and if you
fall on ice, it is hard, and you know that
can hurt you as well. Then you get into areas
where ice may give way. It may plunge us into
freezing water, It may plunge us into hollow areas where
the water is drained out, and so forth. There are
(02:42):
so many ways that ice can pose a danger. Ice
can also just be physically heavy as well.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, the danger of plunging through ice into a hazard
below is not only the case on say like a
frozen pond or lake or something. But think about what
happened to that horse that Charles Darwin came across. We
don't know, but he speculated, well, maybe when the snow
was packed higher, it somehow like fell into a hole
or crevasse in the ice and then and then died
(03:08):
like that, and then the rest of it sublimated away
around it.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, and you don't even have to have really extreme
environments for potentially dangerous examples of this from occurring. Like
I remember as a kid encountering situations where you'd have
like a bog or you know, a marshy area, and
you would have a situation where you would have this
sort of ice cap on top and I guess like
the water drained down during the melting, and so you'd
(03:35):
have this this thin layer of ice on top and
you could fall down through it potentially or climb down
through it and play in it as a child. And
so yeah, that's I guess that's one of the things
that we'll be getting into here, is like ice creates
unique environments that, especially to a child, can be as
intriguing as they are potentially hazardous.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
I'm just thinking now about little rob climbing down through
the ice to play in the bog. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, that was part of my childhood. So yeah, I
think it should come as no surprise that there are
traditional tales and folk traditions seemingly meant to keep children
away from ice, Because again, ice is great fun, children
are curious, and since time out of Mind parents have
invented and passed down tales of perhaps more embodied threats
(04:23):
monsters to scare children away from potentially dangerous environments. Now
this may ring a bell because we discussed one of
these on the podcast a few years back. This would
be Jenny Green Teeth, a river hag of English folklore
widely understood as a kind of nursery boogie to keep
children away from the water's edge bogie rather not boogie.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Yeah. I think Jenny could be used to warn children
of the dangers of water in multiple environments. But the
one that I remember being really salient was like in
certain regions of England, there might be places where there
were holes or pits in the ground, maybe maral pits
or something like that, that had been hollowed out and
then filled in with water. And sometimes this water would
(05:08):
have coverings of like algae or plant matter or something
on top of it that would just make it look
very green, make it look like it was just you know,
a continuation of the grass almost.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, yeah, And you know to your point, you know,
once you have a folk creation like this, it can
be deployed in various ways. It can sort of take
on different meanings and different stressors in different stories. But
there are many variations on this theme in global traditions
where there's some sort of supernatural being that is associated
(05:39):
with the water and the dangers of the water, especially
for young children. The Japanese Kappa is one that we've
also discussed in the past that sometimes takes on these connotations.
And then of course this is another thing we're discussed
in the show before. There's, of course, the nineteen seventy
three British public information film Lonely Water, also known as
the Spirit of Dark and Only Water, featuring the voice
(06:01):
of Donald Pleasance. This very much carries on the tradition here,
and it's often discussed as something that traumatized an entire
generation of British children.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
It sounds like it worked. I mean, are you going
to go play in the flooded mind pits now?
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah? You know. It's a complicated topic though, the use
of boogiemen and boogie women, I guess to frightened children.
I remember reading about some of the works of Francisco
Goya in which he was criticizing this and taught and
(06:41):
like tying in this whole idea that like, by having
parents that invoke supernatural threats to keep children in line,
they're not only potentially protecting their child from these threats,
but they're also instilling supernatural belief at an early age
that then, you know, matures and becomes these other modes
(07:03):
of supernatural belief that to some may be seen as
more harmful in their adulthood.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So, like his ideas, if you teach a child to
fear spectral dangers, even if it's useful in keeping them
away from a real physical danger in childhood, maybe they
just grow up to continue to project spectral dangers that
are not necessary.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, I believe that's the argument. Though. Of course, this
is a complicated issue, so you know, obviously it's there
are a lot of a lot of ins and outs here,
so I don't want to simplify it too much. But
it's interesting to think about, like, what does it mean
when you introduce something like this? What does it mean
when you introduces something that's not even tied to scaring
(07:47):
children so much, like something like like a Santa Claus
or Easter bunny? You know what effect does that have?
And of course you know a lot has been written
and continues to be written and said about this. So anyway,
given all of this, she comes no surprise that there
are traditions that involve creating supernatural entities or monstrous entities
(08:11):
that are associated with the dangers of ice and keeping
children away from the ice. So I want to turn
to a couple of these from Native American First Nations traditions.
The first of these is the Abo damkin. This I
was reading about this in the Dictionary of Native American
(08:33):
Mythology by Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan. This
is apparently an entity in the traditions of the Malaset
and passima Quadi people in what is now the Canadian
province of New Brunswick and the US state of Maine.
The authors here describe it as a boogie monster with
long hair and huge teeth. Quote, fear of him keeps
(08:56):
small children from straying on thin newly from was an
ice in the winter and unguarded beaches in the summer.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Oh, so is this creature in the water?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah? Yeah, I was looking for more information on this
and according to Native Languages as Native hyphen Languages dot org.
It is also sometimes sometimes described as a fanged sea serpent,
sometimes with like long red hair, and some accounts say
that it might have once been a human woman and
was transformed into the state. And despite the fact that
(09:28):
some Western interpretations apparently have classified this is a kind
of vampire, it is actually better thought of as a
sea monster. So, yeah, this would be something that dwells
within the water. Now, another one that I was reading
about this one. There's also a number of you may
be familiar with. Is the Qualipeluit. This is an entity
(09:49):
in the traditions of the Inuit, and there's an excellent
ride up about it on the Kikwitani Inuit Association's Inuit
Myths and Legends website Inuit Myths dot Com, which features
some just haunting artwork and also text that is available
in both English and Inuit. Joe I included one of
these images from the website here that is just absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah, extremely Oh no, and it's it's like snatching a baby.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That's what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The website describes
them as scaly marine humanoids that reek of sulfur, and yeah,
they snatch children. They prey on children who play alone
on the beach or get too close to breaking ice.
They may also feature pouches on their back to stuff
children in though I couldn't tell. It seemed ambiguous based
(10:40):
on the entry and based on the illustrations. There are
a couple of additional illustrations on the website. Whether this
pouch is in their clothing or if this is a
pouch in their body. Here's a haunting excerpt from the
Inuitmiths dot com website. Quote usually the Qualiteluit jump out
of the water and grab children with about any warning. Sometimes, however,
(11:02):
you can hear them knocking under the ice. Some elders
have said that if the ocean begins to become wavy
in an area, or steam begins to rise from the ocean,
aqulllipi lutt might be hiding underneath the water.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
This one is so scary.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I love the idea that of one
of these creatures underneath the ice, like tapping or knocking
at it, especially.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Especially because if you ever do have experiences out on
ice over a frozen body of water, you can hear
strange sounds emanating from below.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's right, right, And one of the things we'll get
into here in a bit is things that can suddenly
occur that also have sounds regarding the ice, especially the
ice close to the shore. So the direct line was
not made between these two topics and the material I
was looking at, But I can't help but think about
it now that I've researched it a little bit. But anyway,
I highly recommend inuitmths dot com. The website features profiles
(11:58):
and a handful of other mythological beam and creatures, including
the two Knit who I mentioned in a recent Monster
Fact episode. Wow, all right, so I mentioned the ice
making sounds. So I want to move on now to
the topic of what is known as ice shove. Now,
this is more of a clear example of weird ice,
or rather ice behaving in a way that many myths
(12:20):
might think of as weird. Though for a number of
you out there, ice shove is just a reality, potential
reality of the winter months. I was reading about this
in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and he mentions there's a
whole passage where he's talking about like long stillness broken
by sudden movement as sort of a hallmark of Arctic landscapes,
(12:41):
and he ties this also into just like a sense
of patience that is also that he observed as being
present in native populations and indigenous peoples. But he cites
an example of this ice shove concerning the breaking of
both river ice and sea ice, and for river ice,
Lowez describes it as follows, quote pistol reports of cracking
(13:03):
on the river, and then the sound of breaking branches
and the whining pop of a fallen tree is the
careening blocks of ice gouge the river banks. And he
describes the sea ice variation as follows quote, Suddenly, in
the middle of winter, and without warning, a huge piece
of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive,
(13:25):
and he cites the inopiat word ivo. I hope I'm
pronouncing that right. My apologies for any mispronunciations on these terms.
And it is also known as ice shove. I've also
seen it referred to as ice tsunamis, along with a
number of other English names. Ice shoves are generally classified
(13:47):
as onshore ice pushes caused by wind currents, changes in temperature,
and other causes. As meteorologist Matthew Capucci explained it in
a twenty twenty Washington Post article, there are a lot
of explainers out these out there that often pop up
when exceptional or notable examples of ice shoves occur, and
(14:10):
this I believe is one of those cases. This meteorologist
pointed out that as the wind blows over a long
sheet of ice, it can give that sheet of ice
enough momentum that it can't stop when pushed against the shore. Instead,
it fragments, and then the fragments pile up in heaps
of shattered ice on the coast. Conditions have to be
(14:31):
just right. The ice has to be thin enough, it
has to be brittle enough, and it generally only piles
up a few feet onto the shore. But there are
of course exceptional examples where things get much higher, or
they go up the shore a little bit more. Apparently
some places are more ideal for it. I saw Lake
Erie pointed out in this article due to its length
(14:52):
and particular orientation, and again there's some pretty exceptional examples.
In June of twenty eleven, along the Chuckchisea coast in Alaska,
ice shove piled up fifteen feet, and I've seen it
record heights as high as like forty feet in some cases.
So that's like a forty foot wall of ice fragments
piling up along the coast.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yikes.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, And Lopez's ice shove measurements here seeman keeping with
the measurements I'm seeing in twenty twenty and ice shove
on Lake Winnebago was, according to NBC twenty six out
of Northeastern Wisconsin quote, a couple of hundred feet long
and taller than the supper Club itself. What does that
quote mean? I'm taking it out of context. The article
(15:37):
had this footage of the ice shove piled up next
to Jim and Linda's Lake Shore supper Club in the
town of Pipe appears to be like a single floor building.
But still that is a lot of ice. Like that's
a huge wall of moving ice, or I mean it's
no longer moving, but still it has moved up. It
has advanced in a way that is concerning.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The supper club is threatened they're gonna get ice in
their hot dish.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh man, wow.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
So I looked up a few pictures of this, and
it is alarming because, yeah, you can see cases where
I guess these are lakeside houses where the ice is
just shoved right up against the house, like you're saying,
happen to the supper club here, and in some cases
shoved into the house and apparently causes damage, like you know,
busts a wall or something.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, yeah, so I you know, I guess it's the
kind of thing where you had observed it and you
knew that it can kind of occur. Suddenly you might
have that in your mind when you can trying to
convince the children not to play too close to the ice. Sometimes,
though it also seems like a rare it's not so
regular in occurrence that it really would happen all of
(16:47):
the time. And coming back to our point earlier, there
are a number of other more common things that could
be dangerous about the ice and the ice at the
edge of the coast. Or of course, even when the
ice has melted, like the water's edge can still be dangerous,
especially to a young child.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, exactly, I mean there's plenty of danger just from
falling in.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah. Now, another interesting ice related phenomena I wanted to
talk about here. There's less to this, and this will
be kind of quick, I guess, but I ran across
(17:28):
this idea of ice blink. It's not so much a
property of the ice itself, but rather an optical interaction.
It's essentially a glare in the sky over an ice field.
Though not to be confused with various other various actual
forms of mirages, such as the fata morgana, which we've
discussed in the show before. These are also found in
(17:50):
the Arctic, and there's an entire chapter in Lopez's book
Arctic Dreams where he talks about about this, about the
northern lights and so forth. But basically, ice blink is
just the bright white reflection in the clouds above an
expanse of ice. So if you're at sea in the
Arctic and you see ice blink in the distance and
(18:11):
you know what you're looking at for and looking at,
of course you can navigate by it, knowing that this
means that there's likely a large expanse of ice in
that direction. Likewise, the opposite is true with water sky.
So if you're on a great expanse of ice and
the overcast sky is bright with reflected light, you might
(18:32):
see a dark patch of sky in the distance that
indicates a body of open water beneath it. So in
other words, it's you know, it's the presence of dark
clouds over an area of open water in a region
that is otherwise frozen. And this, you know, these are
signs that indigenous peoples would have known about and used
(18:53):
to navigate, and techniques that then would have been adopted
by individuals exploring from other parts to the world. It
reminds me of some of what we discussed in our
episodes about Pacific navigation and how there are signs that
the informed mind could look for in the sky that
would indicate the presence of an island.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, that's right. So listeners, if you haven't heard, we
did a series a while back on yeah, techniques of
navigation used by Pacific island peoples to make long sea
voyages without modern instruments and stuff like that, and it's
amazing how much information you can actually get from things
(19:35):
like the stars, sea currents, birds and things like that
that the untrained I would never understand to interpret as
relevant information about where the position of an island was
relative to you. But that was truly one of the
most mind blowing series I think we've ever done, because
(19:56):
it just opened my eyes to the fact that there
is so much information in the world that can be
exploited if you know what to look for, and to
a person who doesn't know what to look for, it's
completely invisible. You'd have no idea that it corresponded to
any kind of navigationally relevant facts.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Absolutely. Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
And anyway, Yeah, this is another thing like that. I
never would have thought of this, but this is very
interesting navigating by the reflection of the surface color of
a landscape over the horizon as it reflects on the
clouds in the sky.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, because to the untrained eye you would just think, oh,
dark cloud in the distance. There's a white cloud in
the distance, but yeah, to know what it means, we
can give you vital information about where you're going.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Now, speaking of the color of ice and of sea ice,
this brings me to something I wanted to talk about today,
which is the color of icebergs. I was thinking about
how most icebergs, of most icebergs and sea ice and
ice sheets you see are basically white in color. But
(21:05):
occasionally I will see photos of icebergs that have streaks
or whole surfaces that are other colors, maybe blue icebergs
that look very beautiful and strange, and I wonder what
makes the difference there, So I looked into this a
little bit. Now, most icebergs are indeed white in color,
(21:26):
but of course sometimes icebergs of other colors can be found,
apparently especially coming off of Antarctica, and we can talk
about reasons for that. But the white, relatively opaque surface
of a common iceberg is caused by how ice accumulates,
which is by adding layers of snow. In most cases,
(21:48):
so icebergs typically begin as part of a glacier or
a polar ice sheet, which eventually breaks off in pieces
and floats away in the ocean. So it originally formed
along with the rest of the glacier. And the way
that forms is snow falls down from the sky, It
piles up, it gets compressed, and if it doesn't melt seasonally,
(22:11):
more snow falls on top of it and just keeps
piling up and getting more and more compressed until it
forms this solid chunk or sheet of ice. This process
can become cumulative over many snowfalls, many seasons, many years,
and eventually it forms this glacier, and then a piece
of this glacier or ice sheet can break off and
(22:32):
float away in the water. So what determines the difference
in color, Well, when you see a white iceberg, what
you're seeing there, apparently is the relatively uncompressed upper or
outer layers of the snowpack that is forming the ice
on top of it. That relatively uncompressed snow contains lots
(22:54):
of little imperfections like air bubbles especially, and just lots
of little reflective surfaces within the relatively low density outer layers.
And these little imperfections and air bubbles and things tend
to scatter light. They reflect all frequencies of light equally,
(23:16):
And of course when you combine all colors of light,
you get white light, so that light bounces off and
it appears white to our eyes. But when you're making
a glacier, as each layer of ice becomes more deeply
buried in a glacier or iceberg, it gets pressed harder
by the layers above, so new snowfalls the ice load
above it becomes heavier, and the imperfections tend to get
(23:39):
squeezed out, like air bubbles get compressed and removed. The
ice crystals that were originally snowflakes get squeezed and they
form larger crystals of dense ice. So this dens or
more compressed ice does not reflect all frequencies of light equally. Instead,
it starts to behave in a different way. It absorbs
(24:00):
or some wavelengths, especially longer wavelengths toward the red end
of the spectrum colors like red, orange, and yellow, whereas
shorter wavelengths on the green, blue, indigo, violet into the
spectrum are less likely to be absorbed and more likely
to bounce back out. So if you see an iceberg
that looks opaque white on the outside, it is probably
(24:20):
covered with snow or uncompressed surface ice or ice that
has been weathered and scratched up in some way. If
you see an iceberg that looks a more cloudy blue,
you're probably seeing the exposed, compressed layers of ice from
an older glacier or from deep inside the glacier formation.
(24:41):
And sometimes icebergs also look blue and a bit more
translucenter even transparent when they somehow capsize in the water,
bringing up the smoother blue portion that was once under
the waterline. And there are also some other formation methods
for blue spectrum and translucent bergs, and frankly, with these
(25:02):
they look not only beautiful but downright shocking.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Rob.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
I've attached a couple of examples for you to look
at here, and it's almost beyond words.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah, this looks like a potential fragment of an amazing
airbrush mural on the side of a van from the
late seventies early eighties that is somehow ended up in
the Arctic. It's like it has that much. It's like
marbled looking as well, like it's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Yeah, this is like held in the hand of an
airbrush wizard. I think it's like, I don't know, breathing
smoke on it or something.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Now, to see ice really looking blue, you don't actually
have to look for an iceberg floating in the water
that has flipped over. Somehow. You can see this, for example,
in cracks and crevasses, in ice sheets and glaciers. I
dug up some pictures for you to look at here, rob,
But if you look this up at home, you can
see it for yourself. Look up like glacier crevass. Often
(26:00):
the way it will appear is that the top layer
is opaque white like we're used to seeing. You know,
where the snow has been piled on. But if you're
able to look down into the crack, you will see
progressively bluer and bluer shades, Like the light coming out
is a deeper blue the deeper you go down. And
(26:21):
again this is a result of that ice being more compressed.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And the blue can look just quite dark to the
untrained eye. You would almost think artificially blue. Yeah, like,
what happened to this glacier? What kind of toilet water
was transformed into this glacier?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
No. I was reading about this in an article for
Scientific American by Catherine Wright called icebergs can be green, black,
striped or even rainbow. And one of the things this
article mentions is its sites an expert named DANIELA. Janssen
who is a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegner Institute for
Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and this researcher talks
(27:12):
about a different iceberg formation process, which is the direct
freezing of sea water leading to the creation of marine ice. So,
according to Jansen, this kind of ice can build up
underneath ice shelves, and an ice shelf is where part
of a land based glacier extends past dry land and
(27:32):
juts out over the sea, so it's like a shelf
over the water. And under the ice shelves of Antarctica,
actual frozen seawater can agglomerate into formations that can eventually
become icebergs, Whereas the snow that falls layer by layer
and accumulates into a glacier on land is mostly pure water.
(27:54):
Ice that accumulates by the freezing of sea water, which
is more rare, comes with a lot of stuff in it.
So because it's seawater, right, so it can have mineral
dust and just you know, grains of rocks and various
kinds of minerals. That can bring different colors to a
resulting iceberg that comes from the freezing of the seawater.
(28:15):
Maybe it has a lot of iron particles in it,
or maybe it has black looking you know, volcanic lava minerals.
It can also have a lot of dead stuff in it,
dead or living organic matter. And apparently marine ice that
forms this way out of seawater with a lot of
dead cells from organic matter can tend to be yellow
(28:39):
or green in color. And so if you've ever seeing
yellow or green icebergs, especially coming from around Antarctica, because
these types of marine ice iceberg, they tend to form
only in very cold conditions because again they have to
be formed out of seawater. Seawater, having greater salt content,
is harder to freeze than fresh water. So basically all
(29:01):
of this, like multicolored ice made out of seawater, only
forms around Antarctica. Anything from the Arctic North will typically
be white or blue. This marine ice that forms around
Antarctica sometimes has these like gross amazing you know, like
green jade or yellow death colors, and a lot of
(29:23):
this tends to be organic contaminants. Meanwhile, marine ice that
forms underneath these ice shelves, but doesn't have much in
the way of contaminants, tends to be very translucent or
even almost transparent, appearing you can see deep into it.
So this is where you get these these strange looking
bergs that are almost as clear as glass and a
very dark color, almost a deep blue or even a black.
(29:47):
You can also get striped icebergs, and this happens when
you have an ice shelf hanging out over the ocean
and cracks form along the submerged portion, and these areas
can flood with seawater, forming stripes of different colors and
opacity than the surrounding ice. So maybe you've got some
ice that's, you know, the regular sort of blue ice,
(30:09):
and then it fills in with some marine ice from
seawater that had a bunch of dead organic matter in it,
so it might have like stripes of yellow or stripes
of green. But I want to move on to another
iceberg related topic, which is icebergs beyond Earth. So you
(30:29):
might kind of wonder, well, how could that even be possible,
because we know that Earth is the only planet in
the Solar System with liquid water oceans on the surface.
Other planets may have had them long ago in the past,
but not today. We do know that there are some
some other objects, some moons in the Solar System that
have liquid oceans underneath the surface, like Jupiter's moon Europa.
(30:54):
But there is one other object in the Solar System
that does have liquid seas in lakes and rivers on
its surface, though they are not made out of water.
That space object is Saturn's moon Titan, which is Saturn's
largest moon, the second largest moon in the whole Solar
System after Jupiter's Ganymede, and the only moon in the
(31:15):
Solar System with a dense atmosphere which is made mostly
of nitrogen and is in fact extremely thick. The atmospheric
pressure on the surface of Titan is about fifty or
sixty percent greater than the pressure at sea level on Earth.
So one comparison I've come across is that just standing
in the air on the surface of Titan would feel
(31:40):
kind of like it would be a level of pressure
similar to being fifteen meters or fifty feet underwater on Earth.
Oh wow, that's thick. Titan is also extremely cold, with
an average surface temperature of one hundred and eighty three
of a negative one hundred and eighty three degrees celsius
or negative two hundred and ninety seven degrees fahrenheit. That's
(32:01):
really cold. Of course, that is too cold to support
liquid water on the surface. It is not going to
have water oceans. But nevertheless, Titan does have large stable
systems of rivers, lakes, and seas made out of not water,
but liquid hydrocarbons, especially liquid methane, ethane, and some liquid nitrogen.
(32:24):
So methane is a hydrocarbon that we know here on
Earth as well chemical formula H four. On Earth, it's
pretty much always in the form of a gas. Ethane.
Another hydrocarbon is C two H six, and together methane
and ethane contribute to a kind of atmospheric chemical cycle
on Titan that has some resemblances to but also some
(32:47):
differences from the water cycle on Earth. So, like, methane
is released apparently from deep inside the interior of Titan,
and then it forms a sort of weather system. It
gets broken down by sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and
there are there is some kind of methane or methane
(33:08):
downstream product weather system where you know, these these organic
molecules fall down from above, so you get like rains
and snows that have these hydrocarbon features. So one of
the consequences of this wet hydrocarbon environment is a surface
with snaking rivers and massive lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, especially
(33:31):
clustered around the Moon's polar regions. So the three largest
of these hydrocarbon seas in order of size are Kraken Mare,
Lygea Mare, and Punga Mare, which are all situated around
the Moon's north pole. Mythology notes, by the way, I
think we know the kraken, but the Punga is the
(33:51):
name of a being in Maori mythology who is a
sun of the sea deity Tangaroa, but also the fog
there are of all creatures considered strange and ugly, including
lizards and sharks. Ligia was the name was a name
that appeared in Greek mythology in multiple contexts, but always
associated with minor seed deities like the Nereids or the Sirens,
(34:17):
and also in a creepy Edgar Allan Poe short story
where I think the deal is Ligia was the narrator's wife,
and she died, and then he marries another woman, and
then she dies, but then resurrects from the dead as
his first wife, Ligia.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
This would be the tomb of Ligia, right.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
I think so, And that's the one that has the
poem the Conqueror Worm.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah. Yeah, And there was a Vincent Price adaptation of
this one to some time.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah. So anyway, you've got these, Maria, These these seas
or lakes, I don't know what the you know, whether
you want to call them sees or lakes. The biggest one,
I think has been compared roughly to the size of
the Caspian Sea on Earth. I think Lygia Marea seen
compared roughly to the size of Lake superior A. But whatever,
(35:04):
how we classify them. These bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on
Titan were documented extensively through radar imaging carried out by
the Cassini Mission orbiter over a period of many years
in the in the two thousands and twenty tens. So
I wanted to zoom in on some of these different
radar images of Legmre, the second largest sea on Titan,
(35:28):
and these photos were taken at intervals between two thousand
and seven and twenty fifteen. Rob, I've got these for
you to look at here. So what we see appears
to be a sort of flower shaped peninsula of land
jetting out into the sea and off of one of
the petals of this flower of land, there is a mystery.
(35:51):
In the image from two thousand and seven, the land
terminates and there's just nothing but dark lake beyond it. Then,
in an image from twenty thirteen, suddenly there is what
appears to be an island off the same coastal feature.
Then in another image from twenty fourteen, the island seems
to have faded into just a wisp of discoloration, something
(36:14):
that looks like it could be you know, I'm using
too much of an Earth analogy here, but it looks
like it could be like an atoll, or like a
bank of shallows. And then by twenty fifteen, the island
has vanished completely and only the dark liquid remains once more.
What the heck or how is the topography of Titan
(36:34):
changing like that? Are islands appearing and disappearing on this
alien sea? So these types of anomalies have been referred
to in the press as the magic islands of Titan,
since they seem to appear and disappear when we're not looking,
and it's still not known for sure what they are,
but there are some ideas, some proposals. You would need
(36:58):
something that would be present long enough to have a
reasonable chance of being caught in images taken by the orbiter,
but also something that would disappear completely within a couple
of years. So there have been various suggestions, including floating
hydrocarbon solids like particles that have fallen from the atmosphere,
(37:18):
maybe a sort of carbon based dust floating on the lake,
or perhaps massive upwellings of nitrogen gas bubbles appearing as
bright spots on the radar image. But just recently in
January twenty twenty four, a group of researchers suggested another possibility,
which is hydrocarbon icebergs, basically porous honeycomb like frozen masses
(37:43):
of hydrocarbons. So the paper in question here is by
Zinting Uau, Julia Garver, Xijiang, and Patricia mcgugen. It's called
the Fate of Simple Organics on Titan's Surface, a theoretical
perspective published in Geophysical Research Letters. So the authors here
(38:03):
are saying, in the atmosphere of Titan, you've got these
simple compounds like methane that get broken down, maybe by
exposure to sunlight, and they recombine and end up transformed
into bigger, more complex organic molecules. And many of these
carbon based compounds freeze solid and fall to the surface.
(38:24):
Now what happens when these hydrocarbon ices fall on the
surface of Titan's lakes. It seems that most of them
probably sink to the bottom, becoming new layers of lake
bed sediment. Because remember it's peculiar to water that frozen
water floats on the surface of liquid water. Most frozen
(38:44):
solids increase in density and would be likely to sink
in liquid, but not all frozen hydrocarbons would sink. The
author's right quote, imagine a sponge full of holes. If
the solids are like this, with twenty five percent to
sixty percent of their volume being empty space, they can float.
Some solids, like hydrogen cyanide ice can also float due
(39:08):
to surface tension effects. And I was reading in a
press release the lead author ut San Antonio planetary scientist
Zinting Yu has compared these icebergs to the way that
porous volcanic pummice can float on the surface of oceans
on Earth before eventually becoming saturated and sinking. So in
(39:30):
this paper, the authors created a model of how various
materials would behave on the lake surface, and they concluded
that it wouldn't work unless conditions were just right. But
if they were right, it would work. You could have
these floating icebergs of hydrocarbons. So to read from the
press release summary, quote used modeling suggested individual clumps are
(39:53):
likely too small to float by themselves, but if enough
clumps mass together near the shore, large pieces could break
off and float away, similar to how glaciers calve on
Earth calving they're referring to, yeah, parts of a glacier
breaking off and falling into the water. The press release
(40:14):
continues with a combination of a bigger size and the
right porosity, these organic glaciers could explain the magic island phenomenon.
So the issue is not settled. This is yet another
proposal for what it could be to explain these these
magic islands in the radar images. But I kind of
hope this explanation has proven right because I love the
(40:35):
idea of icebergs on titan Maybe maybe that would like
warn us away from the humorus of trying to launch
a Titanic on the Lakes of Titan. I don't know,
But then again, I guess if they're very porous and
honeycomb like, maybe they wouldn't represent much of a threat
to bodes. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Well, this is this is fascinating. Yeah, I had not
thought about you know, obviously the topic of ice and
oceans and water on other worlds and moons within our
Solar system has coming before, but I had not looked
at this idea of giant honeycomb glaciers. Potentially this is
(41:15):
This is fascinating. But to be clear, not an alien spaceship.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
No reason to think so. I think we would. We
would exhaust the I don't know, planetary science explanations before
turning to alien technology.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
It's probably telling that the press latched onto the term
Magic Islands and yet like it kind of maybe even
too much of a stretch to say, is this is
this an alien space ship?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Now?
Speaker 2 (41:40):
At best Magic Island.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Well, I have no inclination to think it's a spaceship,
but I still do find that just the idea of
surface features appearing and disappearing on the Lakes of Titan
very very spooky and fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Absolutely all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close
out this episode. Obviously, there's there's so much more we're
regarding ice we could cover. I don't. We haven't decided yet.
If we're doing a third ice episode, we may go
on to some other topic, but potentially we could come
back to ice in the future if that's the case,
because just in Lopez's book, I mean, he has whole
(42:14):
stretches where he's talking about like different types of ice
and the behavior of ice, and of course indigenous beliefs
and traditions concerning ice. There's a lot we could cover.
And likewise, we know a lot of you out there.
You have direct experience with ice in ways that we don't.
You may have takes on some of the things we've
(42:35):
discussed here, observations, traditions, et cetera, and we would love
to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core
episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind podcast feed listener mail on Monday's a
short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
(42:55):
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everyone who has jumped in and given us some stars
and some nice reviews places, and we encourage you to
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if you listen on an Apple device or you use
(43:17):
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you'd like to hear covered, or topics you enjoyed and
you'd like to hear more of in the future, well,
(43:38):
email is the way to get in touch with us,
and Joe will have that email address.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
For you just a second here, right, 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 (44:07):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with
part two of our look at Strange Ice. Now, initially
we didn't know this was going to be a two
part series. Last time, we looked at odd ice formations
that can occur on Earth, such as the main one
I looked at was this thing called nieves penitentes or
just penitentes, which are these very strange sort of blades
(00:39):
or spikes or pinnacles of ice that you can sometimes
find in high mountain ranges, especially in the dry Andies.
And we looked at a historical anecdote of Charles Darwin
trekking across the Andes and coming across a field of
these things, one that had a horse frozen inside it.
But we also looked at ice formations such as ball ice,
(01:01):
candle ice, rotten ice, and a lot of other creepy, interesting,
physically counterintuitive ways that ice can form or decompose. And
so we're coming back today to talk some more about
strange ice.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, I guess this episode's kind of a release valve.
From the last episode, there were a number of threads
that had come up in our research that we just
had to continue to pursue. So some of these are
definitely still going to deal with direct examples of ice
manifesting in a way that we might think of as weird,
behaving in a way that some people might think of
(01:36):
as weird. But we'll also get into some I thought
very fascinating and haunting folk traditions concerning the ice. All right,
what have you got, rob, So in the last episode
we discussed mostly in passing the dangers of ice, specifically
coastal sea ice and any sort of icy environment that
humans will attempt to traverse or in any way exploit
(02:00):
for hunting, fishing, recreation, scientific purposes. Specifically thinking about rotten ice,
you know the idea that it's just not safe to
venture upon. And I imagine we have plenty of listeners
out there who grew up in places with icy environments
who can attest to the dangers of ice that I mean,
there are just so many ways that it can potentially
(02:20):
be dangerous. There's, of course, you know the fact that
ice can be slippery, you can fall, and if you
fall on ice, it is hard, and you know that
can hurt you as well. Then you get into areas
where ice may give way. It may plunge us into
freezing water, It may plunge us into hollow areas where
the water is drained out, and so forth. There are
(02:42):
so many ways that ice can pose a danger. Ice
can also just be physically heavy as well.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, the danger of plunging through ice into a hazard
below is not only the case on say like a
frozen pond or lake or something. But think about what
happened to that horse that Charles Darwin came across. We
don't know, but he speculated, well, maybe when the snow
was packed higher, it somehow like fell into a hole
or crevasse in the ice and then and then died
(03:08):
like that, and then the rest of it sublimated away
around it.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, and you don't even have to have really extreme
environments for potentially dangerous examples of this from occurring. Like
I remember as a kid encountering situations where you'd have
like a bog or you know, a marshy area, and
you would have a situation where you would have this
sort of ice cap on top and I guess like
the water drained down during the melting, and so you'd
(03:35):
have this this thin layer of ice on top and
you could fall down through it potentially or climb down
through it and play in it as a child. And
so yeah, that's I guess that's one of the things
that we'll be getting into here, is like ice creates
unique environments that, especially to a child, can be as
intriguing as they are potentially hazardous.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
I'm just thinking now about little rob climbing down through
the ice to play in the bog. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, that was part of my childhood. So yeah, I
think it should come as no surprise that there are
traditional tales and folk traditions seemingly meant to keep children
away from ice, Because again, ice is great fun, children
are curious, and since time out of Mind parents have
invented and passed down tales of perhaps more embodied threats
(04:23):
monsters to scare children away from potentially dangerous environments. Now
this may ring a bell because we discussed one of
these on the podcast a few years back. This would
be Jenny Green Teeth, a river hag of English folklore
widely understood as a kind of nursery boogie to keep
children away from the water's edge bogie rather not boogie.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Yeah. I think Jenny could be used to warn children
of the dangers of water in multiple environments. But the
one that I remember being really salient was like in
certain regions of England, there might be places where there
were holes or pits in the ground, maybe maral pits
or something like that, that had been hollowed out and
then filled in with water. And sometimes this water would
(05:08):
have coverings of like algae or plant matter or something
on top of it that would just make it look
very green, make it look like it was just you know,
a continuation of the grass almost.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, yeah, And you know to your point, you know,
once you have a folk creation like this, it can
be deployed in various ways. It can sort of take
on different meanings and different stressors in different stories. But
there are many variations on this theme in global traditions
where there's some sort of supernatural being that is associated
(05:39):
with the water and the dangers of the water, especially
for young children. The Japanese Kappa is one that we've
also discussed in the past that sometimes takes on these connotations.
And then of course this is another thing we're discussed
in the show before. There's, of course, the nineteen seventy
three British public information film Lonely Water, also known as
the Spirit of Dark and Only Water, featuring the voice
(06:01):
of Donald Pleasance. This very much carries on the tradition here,
and it's often discussed as something that traumatized an entire
generation of British children.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
It sounds like it worked. I mean, are you going
to go play in the flooded mind pits now?
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah? You know. It's a complicated topic though, the use
of boogiemen and boogie women, I guess to frightened children.
I remember reading about some of the works of Francisco
Goya in which he was criticizing this and taught and
(06:41):
like tying in this whole idea that like, by having
parents that invoke supernatural threats to keep children in line,
they're not only potentially protecting their child from these threats,
but they're also instilling supernatural belief at an early age
that then, you know, matures and becomes these other modes
(07:03):
of supernatural belief that to some may be seen as
more harmful in their adulthood.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So, like his ideas, if you teach a child to
fear spectral dangers, even if it's useful in keeping them
away from a real physical danger in childhood, maybe they
just grow up to continue to project spectral dangers that
are not necessary.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, I believe that's the argument. Though. Of course, this
is a complicated issue, so you know, obviously it's there
are a lot of a lot of ins and outs here,
so I don't want to simplify it too much. But
it's interesting to think about, like, what does it mean
when you introduce something like this? What does it mean
when you introduces something that's not even tied to scaring
(07:47):
children so much, like something like like a Santa Claus
or Easter bunny? You know what effect does that have?
And of course you know a lot has been written
and continues to be written and said about this. So anyway,
given all of this, she comes no surprise that there
are traditions that involve creating supernatural entities or monstrous entities
(08:11):
that are associated with the dangers of ice and keeping
children away from the ice. So I want to turn
to a couple of these from Native American First Nations traditions.
The first of these is the Abo damkin. This I
was reading about this in the Dictionary of Native American
(08:33):
Mythology by Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan. This
is apparently an entity in the traditions of the Malaset
and passima Quadi people in what is now the Canadian
province of New Brunswick and the US state of Maine.
The authors here describe it as a boogie monster with
long hair and huge teeth. Quote, fear of him keeps
(08:56):
small children from straying on thin newly from was an
ice in the winter and unguarded beaches in the summer.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Oh, so is this creature in the water?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah? Yeah, I was looking for more information on this
and according to Native Languages as Native hyphen Languages dot org.
It is also sometimes sometimes described as a fanged sea serpent,
sometimes with like long red hair, and some accounts say
that it might have once been a human woman and
was transformed into the state. And despite the fact that
(09:28):
some Western interpretations apparently have classified this is a kind
of vampire, it is actually better thought of as a
sea monster. So, yeah, this would be something that dwells
within the water. Now, another one that I was reading
about this one. There's also a number of you may
be familiar with. Is the Qualipeluit. This is an entity
(09:49):
in the traditions of the Inuit, and there's an excellent
ride up about it on the Kikwitani Inuit Association's Inuit
Myths and Legends website Inuit Myths dot Com, which features
some just haunting artwork and also text that is available
in both English and Inuit. Joe I included one of
these images from the website here that is just absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah, extremely Oh no, and it's it's like snatching a baby.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That's what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The website describes
them as scaly marine humanoids that reek of sulfur, and yeah,
they snatch children. They prey on children who play alone
on the beach or get too close to breaking ice.
They may also feature pouches on their back to stuff
children in though I couldn't tell. It seemed ambiguous based
(10:40):
on the entry and based on the illustrations. There are
a couple of additional illustrations on the website. Whether this
pouch is in their clothing or if this is a
pouch in their body. Here's a haunting excerpt from the
Inuitmiths dot com website. Quote usually the Qualiteluit jump out
of the water and grab children with about any warning. Sometimes, however,
(11:02):
you can hear them knocking under the ice. Some elders
have said that if the ocean begins to become wavy
in an area, or steam begins to rise from the ocean,
aqulllipi lutt might be hiding underneath the water.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
This one is so scary.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I love the idea that of one
of these creatures underneath the ice, like tapping or knocking
at it, especially.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Especially because if you ever do have experiences out on
ice over a frozen body of water, you can hear
strange sounds emanating from below.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
That's right, right, And one of the things we'll get
into here in a bit is things that can suddenly
occur that also have sounds regarding the ice, especially the
ice close to the shore. So the direct line was
not made between these two topics and the material I
was looking at, But I can't help but think about
it now that I've researched it a little bit. But anyway,
I highly recommend inuitmths dot com. The website features profiles
(11:58):
and a handful of other mythological beam and creatures, including
the two Knit who I mentioned in a recent Monster
Fact episode. Wow, all right, so I mentioned the ice
making sounds. So I want to move on now to
the topic of what is known as ice shove. Now,
this is more of a clear example of weird ice,
or rather ice behaving in a way that many myths
(12:20):
might think of as weird. Though for a number of
you out there, ice shove is just a reality, potential
reality of the winter months. I was reading about this
in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and he mentions there's a
whole passage where he's talking about like long stillness broken
by sudden movement as sort of a hallmark of Arctic landscapes,
(12:41):
and he ties this also into just like a sense
of patience that is also that he observed as being
present in native populations and indigenous peoples. But he cites
an example of this ice shove concerning the breaking of
both river ice and sea ice, and for river ice,
Lowez describes it as follows, quote pistol reports of cracking
(13:03):
on the river, and then the sound of breaking branches
and the whining pop of a fallen tree is the
careening blocks of ice gouge the river banks. And he
describes the sea ice variation as follows quote, Suddenly, in
the middle of winter, and without warning, a huge piece
of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive,
(13:25):
and he cites the inopiat word ivo. I hope I'm
pronouncing that right. My apologies for any mispronunciations on these terms.
And it is also known as ice shove. I've also
seen it referred to as ice tsunamis, along with a
number of other English names. Ice shoves are generally classified
(13:47):
as onshore ice pushes caused by wind currents, changes in temperature,
and other causes. As meteorologist Matthew Capucci explained it in
a twenty twenty Washington Post article, there are a lot
of explainers out these out there that often pop up
when exceptional or notable examples of ice shoves occur, and
(14:10):
this I believe is one of those cases. This meteorologist
pointed out that as the wind blows over a long
sheet of ice, it can give that sheet of ice
enough momentum that it can't stop when pushed against the shore. Instead,
it fragments, and then the fragments pile up in heaps
of shattered ice on the coast. Conditions have to be
(14:31):
just right. The ice has to be thin enough, it
has to be brittle enough, and it generally only piles
up a few feet onto the shore. But there are
of course exceptional examples where things get much higher, or
they go up the shore a little bit more. Apparently
some places are more ideal for it. I saw Lake
Erie pointed out in this article due to its length
(14:52):
and particular orientation, and again there's some pretty exceptional examples.
In June of twenty eleven, along the Chuckchisea coast in Alaska,
ice shove piled up fifteen feet, and I've seen it
record heights as high as like forty feet in some cases.
So that's like a forty foot wall of ice fragments
piling up along the coast.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yikes.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, And Lopez's ice shove measurements here seeman keeping with
the measurements I'm seeing in twenty twenty and ice shove
on Lake Winnebago was, according to NBC twenty six out
of Northeastern Wisconsin quote, a couple of hundred feet long
and taller than the supper Club itself. What does that
quote mean? I'm taking it out of context. The article
(15:37):
had this footage of the ice shove piled up next
to Jim and Linda's Lake Shore supper Club in the
town of Pipe appears to be like a single floor building.
But still that is a lot of ice. Like that's
a huge wall of moving ice, or I mean it's
no longer moving, but still it has moved up. It
has advanced in a way that is concerning.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The supper club is threatened they're gonna get ice in
their hot dish.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh man, wow.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
So I looked up a few pictures of this, and
it is alarming because, yeah, you can see cases where
I guess these are lakeside houses where the ice is
just shoved right up against the house, like you're saying,
happen to the supper club here, and in some cases
shoved into the house and apparently causes damage, like you know,
busts a wall or something.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, yeah, so I you know, I guess it's the
kind of thing where you had observed it and you
knew that it can kind of occur. Suddenly you might
have that in your mind when you can trying to
convince the children not to play too close to the ice. Sometimes,
though it also seems like a rare it's not so
regular in occurrence that it really would happen all of
(16:47):
the time. And coming back to our point earlier, there
are a number of other more common things that could
be dangerous about the ice and the ice at the
edge of the coast. Or of course, even when the
ice has melted, like the water's edge can still be dangerous,
especially to a young child.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, exactly, I mean there's plenty of danger just from
falling in.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah. Now, another interesting ice related phenomena I wanted to
talk about here. There's less to this, and this will
be kind of quick, I guess, but I ran across
(17:28):
this idea of ice blink. It's not so much a
property of the ice itself, but rather an optical interaction.
It's essentially a glare in the sky over an ice field.
Though not to be confused with various other various actual
forms of mirages, such as the fata morgana, which we've
discussed in the show before. These are also found in
(17:50):
the Arctic, and there's an entire chapter in Lopez's book
Arctic Dreams where he talks about about this, about the
northern lights and so forth. But basically, ice blink is
just the bright white reflection in the clouds above an
expanse of ice. So if you're at sea in the
Arctic and you see ice blink in the distance and
(18:11):
you know what you're looking at for and looking at,
of course you can navigate by it, knowing that this
means that there's likely a large expanse of ice in
that direction. Likewise, the opposite is true with water sky.
So if you're on a great expanse of ice and
the overcast sky is bright with reflected light, you might
(18:32):
see a dark patch of sky in the distance that
indicates a body of open water beneath it. So in
other words, it's you know, it's the presence of dark
clouds over an area of open water in a region
that is otherwise frozen. And this, you know, these are
signs that indigenous peoples would have known about and used
(18:53):
to navigate, and techniques that then would have been adopted
by individuals exploring from other parts to the world. It
reminds me of some of what we discussed in our
episodes about Pacific navigation and how there are signs that
the informed mind could look for in the sky that
would indicate the presence of an island.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, that's right. So listeners, if you haven't heard, we
did a series a while back on yeah, techniques of
navigation used by Pacific island peoples to make long sea
voyages without modern instruments and stuff like that, and it's
amazing how much information you can actually get from things
(19:35):
like the stars, sea currents, birds and things like that
that the untrained I would never understand to interpret as
relevant information about where the position of an island was
relative to you. But that was truly one of the
most mind blowing series I think we've ever done, because
(19:56):
it just opened my eyes to the fact that there
is so much information in the world that can be
exploited if you know what to look for, and to
a person who doesn't know what to look for, it's
completely invisible. You'd have no idea that it corresponded to
any kind of navigationally relevant facts.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Absolutely. Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
And anyway, Yeah, this is another thing like that. I
never would have thought of this, but this is very
interesting navigating by the reflection of the surface color of
a landscape over the horizon as it reflects on the
clouds in the sky.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, because to the untrained eye you would just think, oh,
dark cloud in the distance. There's a white cloud in
the distance, but yeah, to know what it means, we
can give you vital information about where you're going.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Now, speaking of the color of ice and of sea ice,
this brings me to something I wanted to talk about today,
which is the color of icebergs. I was thinking about
how most icebergs, of most icebergs and sea ice and
ice sheets you see are basically white in color. But
(21:05):
occasionally I will see photos of icebergs that have streaks
or whole surfaces that are other colors, maybe blue icebergs
that look very beautiful and strange, and I wonder what
makes the difference there, So I looked into this a
little bit. Now, most icebergs are indeed white in color,
(21:26):
but of course sometimes icebergs of other colors can be found,
apparently especially coming off of Antarctica, and we can talk
about reasons for that. But the white, relatively opaque surface
of a common iceberg is caused by how ice accumulates,
which is by adding layers of snow. In most cases,
(21:48):
so icebergs typically begin as part of a glacier or
a polar ice sheet, which eventually breaks off in pieces
and floats away in the ocean. So it originally formed
along with the rest of the glacier. And the way
that forms is snow falls down from the sky, It
piles up, it gets compressed, and if it doesn't melt seasonally,
(22:11):
more snow falls on top of it and just keeps
piling up and getting more and more compressed until it
forms this solid chunk or sheet of ice. This process
can become cumulative over many snowfalls, many seasons, many years,
and eventually it forms this glacier, and then a piece
of this glacier or ice sheet can break off and
(22:32):
float away in the water. So what determines the difference
in color, Well, when you see a white iceberg, what
you're seeing there, apparently is the relatively uncompressed upper or
outer layers of the snowpack that is forming the ice
on top of it. That relatively uncompressed snow contains lots
(22:54):
of little imperfections like air bubbles especially, and just lots
of little reflective surfaces within the relatively low density outer layers.
And these little imperfections and air bubbles and things tend
to scatter light. They reflect all frequencies of light equally,
(23:16):
And of course when you combine all colors of light,
you get white light, so that light bounces off and
it appears white to our eyes. But when you're making
a glacier, as each layer of ice becomes more deeply
buried in a glacier or iceberg, it gets pressed harder
by the layers above, so new snowfalls the ice load
above it becomes heavier, and the imperfections tend to get
(23:39):
squeezed out, like air bubbles get compressed and removed. The
ice crystals that were originally snowflakes get squeezed and they
form larger crystals of dense ice. So this dens or
more compressed ice does not reflect all frequencies of light equally. Instead,
it starts to behave in a different way. It absorbs
(24:00):
or some wavelengths, especially longer wavelengths toward the red end
of the spectrum colors like red, orange, and yellow, whereas
shorter wavelengths on the green, blue, indigo, violet into the
spectrum are less likely to be absorbed and more likely
to bounce back out. So if you see an iceberg
that looks opaque white on the outside, it is probably
(24:20):
covered with snow or uncompressed surface ice or ice that
has been weathered and scratched up in some way. If
you see an iceberg that looks a more cloudy blue,
you're probably seeing the exposed, compressed layers of ice from
an older glacier or from deep inside the glacier formation.
(24:41):
And sometimes icebergs also look blue and a bit more
translucenter even transparent when they somehow capsize in the water,
bringing up the smoother blue portion that was once under
the waterline. And there are also some other formation methods
for blue spectrum and translucent bergs, and frankly, with these
(25:02):
they look not only beautiful but downright shocking.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Rob.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
I've attached a couple of examples for you to look
at here, and it's almost beyond words.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah, this looks like a potential fragment of an amazing
airbrush mural on the side of a van from the
late seventies early eighties that is somehow ended up in
the Arctic. It's like it has that much. It's like
marbled looking as well, like it's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Yeah, this is like held in the hand of an
airbrush wizard. I think it's like, I don't know, breathing
smoke on it or something.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Now, to see ice really looking blue, you don't actually
have to look for an iceberg floating in the water
that has flipped over. Somehow. You can see this, for example,
in cracks and crevasses, in ice sheets and glaciers. I
dug up some pictures for you to look at here, rob,
But if you look this up at home, you can
see it for yourself. Look up like glacier crevass. Often
(26:00):
the way it will appear is that the top layer
is opaque white like we're used to seeing. You know,
where the snow has been piled on. But if you're
able to look down into the crack, you will see
progressively bluer and bluer shades, Like the light coming out
is a deeper blue the deeper you go down. And
(26:21):
again this is a result of that ice being more compressed.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And the blue can look just quite dark to the
untrained eye. You would almost think artificially blue. Yeah, like,
what happened to this glacier? What kind of toilet water
was transformed into this glacier?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
No. I was reading about this in an article for
Scientific American by Catherine Wright called icebergs can be green, black,
striped or even rainbow. And one of the things this
article mentions is its sites an expert named DANIELA. Janssen
who is a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegner Institute for
Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and this researcher talks
(27:12):
about a different iceberg formation process, which is the direct
freezing of sea water leading to the creation of marine ice. So,
according to Jansen, this kind of ice can build up
underneath ice shelves, and an ice shelf is where part
of a land based glacier extends past dry land and
(27:32):
juts out over the sea, so it's like a shelf
over the water. And under the ice shelves of Antarctica,
actual frozen seawater can agglomerate into formations that can eventually
become icebergs, Whereas the snow that falls layer by layer
and accumulates into a glacier on land is mostly pure water.
(27:54):
Ice that accumulates by the freezing of sea water, which
is more rare, comes with a lot of stuff in it.
So because it's seawater, right, so it can have mineral
dust and just you know, grains of rocks and various
kinds of minerals. That can bring different colors to a
resulting iceberg that comes from the freezing of the seawater.
(28:15):
Maybe it has a lot of iron particles in it,
or maybe it has black looking you know, volcanic lava minerals.
It can also have a lot of dead stuff in it,
dead or living organic matter. And apparently marine ice that
forms this way out of seawater with a lot of
dead cells from organic matter can tend to be yellow
(28:39):
or green in color. And so if you've ever seeing
yellow or green icebergs, especially coming from around Antarctica, because
these types of marine ice iceberg, they tend to form
only in very cold conditions because again they have to
be formed out of seawater. Seawater, having greater salt content,
is harder to freeze than fresh water. So basically all
(29:01):
of this, like multicolored ice made out of seawater, only
forms around Antarctica. Anything from the Arctic North will typically
be white or blue. This marine ice that forms around
Antarctica sometimes has these like gross amazing you know, like
green jade or yellow death colors, and a lot of
(29:23):
this tends to be organic contaminants. Meanwhile, marine ice that
forms underneath these ice shelves, but doesn't have much in
the way of contaminants, tends to be very translucent or
even almost transparent, appearing you can see deep into it.
So this is where you get these these strange looking
bergs that are almost as clear as glass and a
very dark color, almost a deep blue or even a black.
(29:47):
You can also get striped icebergs, and this happens when
you have an ice shelf hanging out over the ocean
and cracks form along the submerged portion, and these areas
can flood with seawater, forming stripes of different colors and
opacity than the surrounding ice. So maybe you've got some
ice that's, you know, the regular sort of blue ice,
(30:09):
and then it fills in with some marine ice from
seawater that had a bunch of dead organic matter in it,
so it might have like stripes of yellow or stripes
of green. But I want to move on to another
iceberg related topic, which is icebergs beyond Earth. So you
(30:29):
might kind of wonder, well, how could that even be possible,
because we know that Earth is the only planet in
the Solar System with liquid water oceans on the surface.
Other planets may have had them long ago in the past,
but not today. We do know that there are some
some other objects, some moons in the Solar System that
have liquid oceans underneath the surface, like Jupiter's moon Europa.
(30:54):
But there is one other object in the Solar System
that does have liquid seas in lakes and rivers on
its surface, though they are not made out of water.
That space object is Saturn's moon Titan, which is Saturn's
largest moon, the second largest moon in the whole Solar
System after Jupiter's Ganymede, and the only moon in the
(31:15):
Solar System with a dense atmosphere which is made mostly
of nitrogen and is in fact extremely thick. The atmospheric
pressure on the surface of Titan is about fifty or
sixty percent greater than the pressure at sea level on Earth.
So one comparison I've come across is that just standing
in the air on the surface of Titan would feel
(31:40):
kind of like it would be a level of pressure
similar to being fifteen meters or fifty feet underwater on Earth.
Oh wow, that's thick. Titan is also extremely cold, with
an average surface temperature of one hundred and eighty three
of a negative one hundred and eighty three degrees celsius
or negative two hundred and ninety seven degrees fahrenheit. That's
(32:01):
really cold. Of course, that is too cold to support
liquid water on the surface. It is not going to
have water oceans. But nevertheless, Titan does have large stable
systems of rivers, lakes, and seas made out of not water,
but liquid hydrocarbons, especially liquid methane, ethane, and some liquid nitrogen.
(32:24):
So methane is a hydrocarbon that we know here on
Earth as well chemical formula H four. On Earth, it's
pretty much always in the form of a gas. Ethane.
Another hydrocarbon is C two H six, and together methane
and ethane contribute to a kind of atmospheric chemical cycle
on Titan that has some resemblances to but also some
(32:47):
differences from the water cycle on Earth. So, like, methane
is released apparently from deep inside the interior of Titan,
and then it forms a sort of weather system. It
gets broken down by sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and
there are there is some kind of methane or methane
(33:08):
downstream product weather system where you know, these these organic
molecules fall down from above, so you get like rains
and snows that have these hydrocarbon features. So one of
the consequences of this wet hydrocarbon environment is a surface
with snaking rivers and massive lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, especially
(33:31):
clustered around the Moon's polar regions. So the three largest
of these hydrocarbon seas in order of size are Kraken Mare,
Lygea Mare, and Punga Mare, which are all situated around
the Moon's north pole. Mythology notes, by the way, I
think we know the kraken, but the Punga is the
(33:51):
name of a being in Maori mythology who is a
sun of the sea deity Tangaroa, but also the fog
there are of all creatures considered strange and ugly, including
lizards and sharks. Ligia was the name was a name
that appeared in Greek mythology in multiple contexts, but always
associated with minor seed deities like the Nereids or the Sirens,
(34:17):
and also in a creepy Edgar Allan Poe short story
where I think the deal is Ligia was the narrator's wife,
and she died, and then he marries another woman, and
then she dies, but then resurrects from the dead as
his first wife, Ligia.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
This would be the tomb of Ligia, right.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
I think so, And that's the one that has the
poem the Conqueror Worm.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah. Yeah, And there was a Vincent Price adaptation of
this one to some time.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah. So anyway, you've got these, Maria, These these seas
or lakes, I don't know what the you know, whether
you want to call them sees or lakes. The biggest one,
I think has been compared roughly to the size of
the Caspian Sea on Earth. I think Lygia Marea seen
compared roughly to the size of Lake superior A. But whatever,
(35:04):
how we classify them. These bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on
Titan were documented extensively through radar imaging carried out by
the Cassini Mission orbiter over a period of many years
in the in the two thousands and twenty tens. So
I wanted to zoom in on some of these different
radar images of Legmre, the second largest sea on Titan,
(35:28):
and these photos were taken at intervals between two thousand
and seven and twenty fifteen. Rob, I've got these for
you to look at here. So what we see appears
to be a sort of flower shaped peninsula of land
jetting out into the sea and off of one of
the petals of this flower of land, there is a mystery.
(35:51):
In the image from two thousand and seven, the land
terminates and there's just nothing but dark lake beyond it. Then,
in an image from twenty thirteen, suddenly there is what
appears to be an island off the same coastal feature.
Then in another image from twenty fourteen, the island seems
to have faded into just a wisp of discoloration, something
(36:14):
that looks like it could be you know, I'm using
too much of an Earth analogy here, but it looks
like it could be like an atoll, or like a
bank of shallows. And then by twenty fifteen, the island
has vanished completely and only the dark liquid remains once more.
What the heck or how is the topography of Titan
(36:34):
changing like that? Are islands appearing and disappearing on this
alien sea? So these types of anomalies have been referred
to in the press as the magic islands of Titan,
since they seem to appear and disappear when we're not looking,
and it's still not known for sure what they are,
but there are some ideas, some proposals. You would need
(36:58):
something that would be present long enough to have a
reasonable chance of being caught in images taken by the orbiter,
but also something that would disappear completely within a couple
of years. So there have been various suggestions, including floating
hydrocarbon solids like particles that have fallen from the atmosphere,
(37:18):
maybe a sort of carbon based dust floating on the lake,
or perhaps massive upwellings of nitrogen gas bubbles appearing as
bright spots on the radar image. But just recently in
January twenty twenty four, a group of researchers suggested another possibility,
which is hydrocarbon icebergs, basically porous honeycomb like frozen masses
(37:43):
of hydrocarbons. So the paper in question here is by
Zinting Uau, Julia Garver, Xijiang, and Patricia mcgugen. It's called
the Fate of Simple Organics on Titan's Surface, a theoretical
perspective published in Geophysical Research Letters. So the authors here
(38:03):
are saying, in the atmosphere of Titan, you've got these
simple compounds like methane that get broken down, maybe by
exposure to sunlight, and they recombine and end up transformed
into bigger, more complex organic molecules. And many of these
carbon based compounds freeze solid and fall to the surface.
(38:24):
Now what happens when these hydrocarbon ices fall on the
surface of Titan's lakes. It seems that most of them
probably sink to the bottom, becoming new layers of lake
bed sediment. Because remember it's peculiar to water that frozen
water floats on the surface of liquid water. Most frozen
(38:44):
solids increase in density and would be likely to sink
in liquid, but not all frozen hydrocarbons would sink. The
author's right quote, imagine a sponge full of holes. If
the solids are like this, with twenty five percent to
sixty percent of their volume being empty space, they can float.
Some solids, like hydrogen cyanide ice can also float due
(39:08):
to surface tension effects. And I was reading in a
press release the lead author ut San Antonio planetary scientist
Zinting Yu has compared these icebergs to the way that
porous volcanic pummice can float on the surface of oceans
on Earth before eventually becoming saturated and sinking. So in
(39:30):
this paper, the authors created a model of how various
materials would behave on the lake surface, and they concluded
that it wouldn't work unless conditions were just right. But
if they were right, it would work. You could have
these floating icebergs of hydrocarbons. So to read from the
press release summary, quote used modeling suggested individual clumps are
(39:53):
likely too small to float by themselves, but if enough
clumps mass together near the shore, large pieces could break
off and float away, similar to how glaciers calve on
Earth calving they're referring to, yeah, parts of a glacier
breaking off and falling into the water. The press release
(40:14):
continues with a combination of a bigger size and the
right porosity, these organic glaciers could explain the magic island phenomenon.
So the issue is not settled. This is yet another
proposal for what it could be to explain these these
magic islands in the radar images. But I kind of
hope this explanation has proven right because I love the
(40:35):
idea of icebergs on titan Maybe maybe that would like
warn us away from the humorus of trying to launch
a Titanic on the Lakes of Titan. I don't know,
But then again, I guess if they're very porous and
honeycomb like, maybe they wouldn't represent much of a threat
to bodes. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Well, this is this is fascinating. Yeah, I had not
thought about you know, obviously the topic of ice and
oceans and water on other worlds and moons within our
Solar system has coming before, but I had not looked
at this idea of giant honeycomb glaciers. Potentially this is
(41:15):
This is fascinating. But to be clear, not an alien spaceship.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
No reason to think so. I think we would. We
would exhaust the I don't know, planetary science explanations before
turning to alien technology.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
It's probably telling that the press latched onto the term
Magic Islands and yet like it kind of maybe even
too much of a stretch to say, is this is
this an alien space ship?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Now?
Speaker 2 (41:40):
At best Magic Island.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Well, I have no inclination to think it's a spaceship,
but I still do find that just the idea of
surface features appearing and disappearing on the Lakes of Titan
very very spooky and fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Absolutely all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close
out this episode. Obviously, there's there's so much more we're
regarding ice we could cover. I don't. We haven't decided yet.
If we're doing a third ice episode, we may go
on to some other topic, but potentially we could come
back to ice in the future if that's the case,
because just in Lopez's book, I mean, he has whole
(42:14):
stretches where he's talking about like different types of ice
and the behavior of ice, and of course indigenous beliefs
and traditions concerning ice. There's a lot we could cover.
And likewise, we know a lot of you out there.
You have direct experience with ice in ways that we don't.
You may have takes on some of the things we've
(42:35):
discussed here, observations, traditions, et cetera, and we would love
to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core
episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind podcast feed listener mail on Monday's a
short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
(42:55):
movie on Weird House Cinema as I want to thank
everyone who has jumped in and given us some stars
and some nice reviews places, and we encourage you to
do that. If you like the show, that's one small
thing you can do to help support us. Let's see. Likewise, Hey,
if you listen on an Apple device or you use
(43:17):
Apple podcasts, jump in there. Make sure you're still subscribe,
make sure you're still receiving downloads, and if anything looks
out of line, I think those that platform allows you
to chime in and say something. So Hey. In general, though,
if you have direct feedback on the episodes and topics
you'd like to hear covered, or topics you enjoyed and
you'd like to hear more of in the future, well,
(43:38):
email is the way to get in touch with us,
and Joe will have that email address.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
For you just a second here, right, 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 (44:07):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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