Ice: Beauty. Danger. History by Pauline Couture November 2004
Fun Facts About Ice
More than a third of Canada’s land mass is above the Arctic Circle. No wonder we’re the global experts on ice. The Canadian Ice Service provides a 90-page manual to teach people how to observe and report ice conditions. Terms include such exotica as frazil, grease, slush, shuga, nilas, rind, firn, tongue, pancake, floeberg, ice breccia, batture ice and brash ice. In the Illinoian glaciation, during the Great Ice Age, most of North America was under ice up to a kilometre thick. In Alaska, you need a state permit to harvest more than 20 tons of glacier ice a day from a single source, usually .a tidewater-calving glacier. The famous Titanic disaster was only one of 400 known iceberg collisions in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland and Labrador since 1818. Bergy bits are pieces of sea ice smaller than icebergs, but still 5 to 15 metres in length, and weighing thousands of tonnes. Some mountain lakes, such as Vermillion Lake in Alberta, have such clear ice that even when it is four feet thick, it is possible to see fish and muskrats swimming, as well as observe elk carcasses under the ice as you skate on it. In the 1960s, scientists used the Athabasca Glacier as a proxy for moon rocks in preparation for the lunar landing. This was because they judged that the glacier ice had the closest conductivity to lunar rocks. The large polar ice cap, and the many ice sheets of the Arctic Ocean, are home to a garden of algae. This algal garden, which consists primarily of diatoms, covers the underside of the sea ice, and even parts of the ice's interior. Growth of these ice algae begins in early March and peaks in May, after which time it declines rapidly with the ice melt. These ice algae serve as an important food source for marine crustaceans, worms, and fish. Life on the planet is fundamentally shaped by the fact that ice floats on water. If it sank to the bottom of our ponds, rivers, lakes and seas then bio-organisms would be fundamentally different and/or absent in temperate and cold zones. Because ice floats, and because it is far more reflective than water (which absorbs heat), global warming
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Ice: Beauty. Danger. History by Pauline Couture November 2004
is not a linear phenomenon. The more ice melts, the faster the earth absorbs additional heat from the sun. Therefore, radical change to climate, the Gulfstream, etc. could come very suddenly, in a matter of a decade or less rather than the millennia the ice ages took. Travel Ice as bridge for travel between otherwise inaccessible locations. Remote northern communities depend on winter ice roads to bring in annual supplies of fuel, heavy and large equipment, construction materials, and other necessities. Long distance travel in northern regions before 1900 depended on open or frozen waterways. In WWII ice bridges across the MacKenzie were kept open by Canada's military in early spring by insulating the ice with wood chips. The Ice Ship In WWII, Winston Churchill asked that Canada research the possibility of using ships constructed out of ice to ply the North Atlantic. A prototype was built in Alberta, and sunk in a mountain lake when the experiment was judged a failure. Finland Tapio Wirkkala and other Finnish designers in glass have created many beautiful glasses and vases with shapes and textures derived from ice, particlarly the thousand year old Finnish craft of making ice lanterns. Recipe for Ice lanterns Fill small plastic bucket(s) with water. Place outdoors overnight in sub-zero temperatures, or in your freezer. In the morning tap off the surface ice and empty the unfrozen core of water to make a 'vase' of ice. Store in sub-zero place while making more on following nights. Experiment with exposing vase to some sunlight to erratically glaze and lightly erode the ouside of the vase. Place tea-light or other stable candle in bottom of vase to make an outdoor lantern. For special Christmas or other pantheistic winter events put a row of lit lanterns in the snow alongside your walk, around your door, outside the window of a room lit only with candles, etc. When set in snow the lanterns can cast a deep halo of light down into the snow. Seals Seals have a delayed implantation mechanism for eggs in their wombs that times the birth of seal pups to coincide with the breakup of their winter ice habitat into floes…thereby giving the seal pups a better chance to survive being eaten by polar bears. The voracious bears are forced to swim between floes. On open ice the bears snap them up by the dozen like hot dogs. 'RICE' (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation) is the recommended treatment for burns, bruises, ligament and muscle sprains, etc.
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Ice: Beauty. Danger. History by Pauline Couture November 2004
At Home In the developed world nearly every home has a machine for producing only one raw material. Everything else is brought home. Freezing stops the growth of bacteria. A full upright or chest freezer will keep food frozen for up to 2 days during a power failure. A half-full freezer will keep the food frozen for about one day if the freezer is kept closed. Food that still contains ice crystals or feels refrigerator-cold can be re-frozen. The recent breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf off Antarctica resulted in the creation of icebergs the size of Singapore floating in the Antarctic Ocean. Rime is the ice that forms when supercooled water droplets freeze on contact with an object. The arctic cod has an unusual affection for ice. Even during the brief polar summer, when the sea ice fragments, these fish nuzzle into small ice crevices, only leaving this shelter to grasp prey. Such a habit leaves the arctic cod vulnerable when ice breakers are in the vicinity, for they overturn the pack ice and leave the fish exposed. Separated from their submarine shelters, the cod are soon eaten by marine birds, such as kittiwakes, which tail these ships, much like gulls that follow tractors in southern farm fields. Sea ice floats because it is less dense in the solid phase than it is in the liquid phase. If sea ice were MORE dense in the solid phase, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean (light things can't carry heavy things too well, right? Sinking, dense ice would cause the oceans to freeze to their beds, so animals and plants which live on the ocean floor would die! Sea ice is made of oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms that are joined together like a net. Hydrogen bonding gives ice all of its unusual properties. As ice melts, hydrogen bonds are broken. The molecules become more closely packed, or more DENSE. This is why ice can float on water!
Sea ice is about as salty as the ice in your refrigerator! Although sea ice is made from salty sea water, the salt molecules are rejected back into the liquid as ice forms. There isn't much room for salt molecules to be trapped in the close-knit structure of sea ice.
Ice water won’t cool your mouth down after eating a chili pepper because the
capsaicin which is the hot ingredient in the chili is insoluble in cold water. To cool your burning tongue, you’d be better off eating a dairy product like milk, sour cream or ice cream immediately. The more fat there is, the more efficiently it will absorb the heat. Starchy foods also work.
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Ice: Beauty. Danger. History by Pauline Couture November 2004
Bacteria are not as common in the extreme cold but they are there. Scientist know of bacterial species that live all their lives in the ice of glaciers and other bacteria have often found in the snows of the North and South poles Until recently scientists had thought bacteria found in these latitudes were just blown there by the winds but in 2000AD they proved that some of these species are different to any others and live at the North pole all year round where the temperature varies between -17 and -85 degrees C.
Toronto’s free ice sculpture exhibition, Designs in Ice, uses 19,090 kg (42,000 lbs.) of ice, created from 18,900 litres of purified water. It takes three to four days to completely freeze a 300 lb. block of ice.
Beneath the familiar business of water freezing to ice lies a process so complex it took Japanese researchers six years to make the first realistic computer simulation of it (announced March 28, 2002).
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Ice: Beauty. Danger. History by Pauline Couture November 2004
Quick Glacier Facts
* Currently, 10% of land area is covered with glaciers. * Glaciers store about 75% of the world's freshwater. * Glacierized areas cover over 15,000,000 square kilometres. * Antarctic ice is over 4,200 metres thick in some areas. * In the United States, glaciers cover over 75,000 square kilometres, with most of the glaciers located in Alaska. * During the last Ice Age, glaciers covered 32% of the total land area. * If all land ice melted, sea level would rise approximately 70 metres worldwide. * Glacier ice crystals can grow to be as large as baseballs. * The land underneath parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be up to 2.5 kilometres below sea level, due to the weight of the ice. * North America's longest glacier is the Bering Glacier in Alaska, measuring 204 kilometres long. * The Malaspina Glacier in Alaska is the world's largest piedmont glacier, covering over 8,000 square kilometres and measuring over 193 kilometres across at its widest point. * Glacial ice often appears blue because ice absorbs all other colors and reflects blue. * The Kutiah Glacier in Pakistan holds the record for the fastest glacial surge. In 1953, it raced more than 12 kilometres in three months, averaging about 112 metres per day. * In Washington State alone, glaciers provide 470 billion gallons of water each summer. * Antarctic ice shelves may calve icebergs that are over 80 kilometres long. * Almost 90% of an iceberg is below water--only about 10% shows above water. * The Antarctic ice sheet has been in existence for at least 40 million years. * From the 17th century to the late 19th century, the world experienced a "Little Ice Age", when temperatures were consistently cool enough for significant glacier advances.
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