Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss a handful of novel ice formations and how scientists believe they form. (originally published 1/30/2024, part 1 of 2)
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. Today is Saturday, so we are heading into the vault for an older episode of the podcast. This is part one of a two part series that we did called Strange Ice, originally published January thirtieth, twenty twenty four. Let's get right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
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.
That's right. Yeah, we had quite a cold snow 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.
I should's bestfy it was cold weather for Atlanta, because obviously we get sneered at by you know, people who live in they're really they're really freezing climbs, 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 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 all that freezes up. 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 solid, except there's this little extra bit. There's a spike emerging. 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.
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 put in the tray of ice cubes and you'll pull them out and they'll have like what looks like, I don't know, the outline of a comet impact on the surface of the ice cube, frozen in time exactly. Yeah.
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 explainer 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 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.
I'm picturing the Statler and Waldorf.
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 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 Rankin 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 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, 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 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, another author that is credited is 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 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 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.
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.
That's right. Yeah, I was reading about the work of physicist Kenneth Librecht, who conducted a study of ice spikes in two thousand and three and found that there's kind of like a Goldilock 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 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 the likelihood of ice spikes, and in his experiments, tap water didn't work 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.
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, bands rather than contract as it freezes. So and you know, a lot of things actually on Earth and in life in the universe are 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 works on Earth. I think I've read some arguments before that it like if that were 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 expands instead of contracting when it freezes. But also we get these ice bikes. So like, yeah, like you explained, rob, you've got to contain 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 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 and taller. For liquids that shrink in volume as they freeze, this would never happen, right, right.
So it's yeah, it's it's a fun little thing to observe at the at a frozen bird bath or inside of a freezer if conditions are right and 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 ice, and we have some some fun ones to discuss here.
Okay, So I'm going to talk about a bizarre haunting genre of ice formation, referred to as nieves penet tents 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 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 sometimes described as standing blades, pinnacles, towers, or columns of ice. They can reach up to a maximum of 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 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 the impression of a vast, uncountable crowd of worshippers or of maybe monks gathering at the end of a great procession or pilgrimage.
Yeah, there's some very evocative photos of these who 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.
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 maze with chaotic corridors and pathways that are bounded by these thin, jagged ridges of ice. So 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 maze.
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.
Yeah, and that can create a very creepy feeling you see people posing with them. Sometimes they're you know, 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 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 Bagle, during which journey Darwin made geological and 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. 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 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, 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 discovering some fossil seashells embedded in rocks 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 called the Portillo Pass. And so March late March I was thinking of winter trans aditioning 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 is 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 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.
I'm getting shades of Bilbo is there about the journey through the misty mountains here?
Oh that's funny. Yeah, No, lyrics of songs are included Unfortunately, here.
Does he complain about the lack of food though.
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 the atmosphere had 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 high elevation at his camp is functioning like a reverse pressure cooker. Inside a pressure cooker, you increase the boiling point of water 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 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, 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 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 c Of course, in a regular pot, water cannot get hotter than its boiling point, which means there's a limit 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 cook 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. 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 cook 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 in enjoyable. You know, if I was making a baked potato and doing an internal temperature, I would take it to like two oh eight fahrenheit. You need to take it to almost the boiling point of water. And 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 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 digest, 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 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 pit, 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.
Fascinating.
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 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 or a type of South American camelidly related to the lama.
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 seen.
I thought they were cute. Darwin goes on. We had a fine view of a massive mountains called Tupungato, the whole clothed with 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 puquines, 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 our cargo mules to pass on. In 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 afterwards the surrounding parts must have been removed by the thall. Oh wow, So it's a shocking and evocative 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 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 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 during deposition. 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 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 penitentase are unique to certain conditions. They only they're especially associated with 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 glaciers in the Andes. In these conditions, when the surface of a snowfield is heated by the sun, it does not melt into a liquid, 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, 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 endies is sublimating in the sunshine. The question is what causes it to turn into blades or pinnacles instead of simply disappearing sort of evenly across the whole sheet of snowfall. Well, there may still be some disagreement 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 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 a couple of papers in 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 the surface of the snowfield that cause a ray of sunlight to bounce sideways 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, 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? 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 keep 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 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, 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 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 Philippe Claudin 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 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 of spacing is favored within one field of these things. So their paper adds a couple of other mechanis 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. 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 peaks and valleys. Ball writes 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 c amplifying in 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 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 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 Ane and co authors argued that it is this 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 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 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 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, 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. And 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 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 going to 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.
Nope, And then Gandalf turns to him and says, Charles, your role in this mission is extremely important.
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, 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 equator on average, 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 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 a 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 the penitentes form and how that would affect what we should expect to find on icy planets like Europa.
I found that many of the ice 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 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 eyes. 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.
What rotten ice?
Rotten ice? Yeah, I know it 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 in advanced stage of melting. So it's 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.
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 model old pattern, as opposed to just like you know, thinning out evenly across its surface.
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 more common. It's 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 its melting could quote contribute significantly to Arctic shelf carbon and nitrogen cycling and therefore to Arctic biogeochemistry more generally. So it's enterallying. It kind of comes back to the same real home of what you pointed out earlier. I mean, we're we live on a water planet, and the different phases of water are are are connected to the way that life works on our planet. And so yeah, the story of ice is also connected to the story of life.
No doubt, especially if you're a water dwelling organism.
Right even if you just happen 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, is Minnesota Sea Grant and the author here points out that candle ized leaves long thin 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 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 elongated crystals that kind of rise up and then fall to the side almost like I mean, there's almost a sense of like icy spines parting.
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.
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 pasting is a type of ice that is often referred to as beach ice balls or sometimes mermaid's bowling balls.
Who came up with that name?
I mean, 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 soccer ball sizes, so they're spiracle. They're 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 slusha that's another form of vice 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 summer, there's some in the water, and then there's some just piled up on a beach.
Wow. 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.
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 vowling ball. 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 up to make a snowman. According to Downing. So yeah, just imagine again realized this can 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 these big balls of ice. All right. In the last one, I want to talk about here. This is 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 might describe the scene here as you have a frozen lake, so you have clear ice over you, like the dark blue depths of the lake, but with strange white discs 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 these formations compared to like a lava lamp before, except there is no movement. Everything is frozen in place.
Yeah. 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.
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 boom of the bottom of the lake and that decomposes releases methane when the temperature drops, 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 ice cap thickens, more bubbles up and become trapped underneath the even thicker ice, and this continues, creating this multi layered lava lamp kind of appearance.
And I guess we can only see it because of the relatively transparent surface of the of the ice on the lake here.
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, you potentially have these bubbles because you have organic matter tree limbs, plant matter, whatever. At the bottom releasing methane, and then if there's freezing going on, you're gonna have these bubbles trapped in there. But it seems to be a 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 of the bubbles I see, So I would I haven't seen these in person, have only seen imag 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. You know, it looks really.
Cool, absolutely does beautiful even.
Yeah, though also so cold, so cold.
Looking makes me want a well done potato.
All right. Well, on that note, I believe we're going to go ahead and close out this episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there, and especially on this one. A lot of you are going to have examples of strange eyed 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 here. 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 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.
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.
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