Results tagged “ice” from 60 Second Science

Remember how when you were little and it rained, your parents told you God is crying because you did something wrong? Turns out it's actually just a whole host of bacteria coalescing into ice and plummeting back to Earth. Because you did something wrong.

Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, with colleagues in Montana and France, reported today in Science that most ice nucleators, particles ice forms around, found in snow at mid- and high-latitude locations were biological in origin. I.e., it's just just the yellow snow you need to worry about. It's pretty much all filled with creepy crawlies (or, more appropriately, fearsome flagellum).

Their guess, then, is that the bacteria affects the rain cycle or actually causes their own precipitation.

Continue reading 'Why's it raining? Bacteria. That's why.' >

The web site of the magazine Architecture Week now features an entertaining and informative excerpt the 2007 book How to Build an Igloo, and Other Snow Shelters by Norbert E. Yankielun, with illustrations by Amelia Bauer.

In addition to providing would-be igloo builders with a step-by-step guide to building an ice fortress, the excerpt explains how tension and compression act on the ice-bricks to keep the structure stranding; it even includes easy-to-interpret force diagrams. Other gems include: why the cross-sections of igloos are more like parabolas than semicircles, “gopher holes,” appropriate saws, and why you should cut a ramp in the snowblocks.

A few other fine points and thoughts on building an igloo:

Continue reading 'How to build an igloo' >

Antarctica's Lake Vostok lies below 4 kilometers of ice, is 15 million years old, and may reveal new organisms that survive in total darkness and cold without sustenance from the sun. It also sounds like the perfect place for the base of an evil genius — I'm planning on looking into real estate promptly.

For five years,a joint team of Russian, American and French scientists have sought to core the ice around the lake, which provides a paleo-climatic record of at least 400,000 years, and maybe as much as a million years. Finally, scientists are now thawing ice segments cut from an 11,866-foot ice core drilled back in 1998. Scientists have been worried about contaminating the lake with microbes from the surface world, but they got around that problem by taking the core from 656 feet above the surface of the lake, two miles below the surface of Antarctica. The ice has since been stored at -35 degrees Celsius at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where I'm applying for a job tomorrow.

Continue reading 'Scientists probe ice from 15-million-year-old Antarctic lake, praise its "refreshing taste"' >