DailyDirt: The Beauty Of Frozen Water

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Water is an amazing substance. It's sometimes called the universal solvent. It's a requirement for all known forms of life. It's one of the rare chemical compounds that is less dense when it's frozen at ambient conditions. Water is cool, and ice is even cooler. So here are just a few links related to visually stunning ice formations.

• Ice flowers are a delicate formation of ice crystals made under windless conditions when supersaturated water vapor above sea ice condenses into dendritic ice crystals. Ice flowers are a natural phenomenon -- typically seen early in the morning. [url]
• An art project called 'Pi in the Sky' printed the first thousand digits of pi using 5 'skytyping' planes at about 10,000 feet in the air -- probably not quite high enough to form a cloud of ice crystals, but it was still cool looking. Cirrus clouds which are mostly ice crystals form at slightly higher altitudes (around 18,000 feet or higher), but skywriting-skytyping planes actually spray paraffin oil to form their messages. [url]
• The "icicle of death" (also known as a "brinicle") is made of freezing water that occurs as cold, dense salt water sinks through less salty sea water. The frozen brine can kill sea urchins and starfish when it touches them on the sea floor. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: brinicle, clouds, ice, ice flowers, icicles, water, weather