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Mark Frauenfelder at 8:34 am • 
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Twisted Sifter has a great gallery of snowflake and ice crystal electron microscope photos. At this level of magnification, the ice looks like metal that has been machined by space aliens.
Rob Beschizza at 5:55 am • •
For $12, Gama Go will sell you a mould that makes skull-shaped ice cubes. Not technically cubes, though, are they?
P.S. This reminded me that we require pyramid-shaped ice cubes (i.e. pyramids) for our illuminati parties. Unfortunately, all the molds available online seem to be floppy silicone ones with the tops flattened to be stable in the freezer or oven. This is clearly unacceptable -- does anyone make a nice hard plastic one with pointy tops? If not, we may have to kickstart this.
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 12:29 pm • •
The Fulton Market Cold Storage Company building in Chicago has been, well, storing cold things since the 1920s. But last July, the company sold the building and moved to a more modern facility outside town, leaving the old cold storage warehouse to be turned into offices.
But first, the new owners had to defrost it.
The Fulton Market Cold Storage building has ice-covered walls for the same reason a freezer can get covered in hard, packed ice. When you put something into a freezer — say, a giant slab of beef fresh from a slaughterhouse — that thing contains moisture. There's liquid trapped inside it. Over time, especially if it's not sealed very well, that moisture will turn into water vapor in the air. When temperature changes cause that vapor to condense back into liquid, it instantly freezes — turning to ice anywhere it touches.
In your fridge at home, that's just an annoyance. At the Fulton Market Cold Storage building, it was epic.
Besides the video above, you should really check out the amazing photos taken for the ice, pre-melt, by photographer Gary Jensen.
Via This Is Colossal
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 7:25 am • •
Not all snowflakes are unique in their shape. There's one fact for you.
And here's another: The shape of snowflakes — whether individually distinct or mass-production common — is determined by chemistry. Specifically, the shape is a function of the temperatures and meteorological conditions the snowflakes are exposed to as they form and the way those factors affect the growth of ice crystals.
This short video from Bytesize Science will give you a nice overview of snowflake production and will help you understand why some snowflakes are unique, and why others aren't.
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:32 pm • •
Henry Kaiser is kind of our man on the inside in Antarctica. He works there every year as a film maker, turning science into movies. He sent this awesome Halloween greeting from underneath the sea ice.
Bonus: He also sent us a video taken at the same spot — only this has 100% fewer wacky masks and 100% more sea anemones.
Read the rest
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:39 am • •
"The sound of running water is not something you used to hear on an ice cap." Arctic explorer Will Steger said this last weekend, during a presentation at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Steger was showing video clips from some of his travels, and he had to speak rather loudly. Otherwise, we couldn't have heard him over the sound of running water, flowing over, under, and through an ice cap.
Steger started traveling to the Arctic 18 years ago, and he's seen the region change dramatically over time. Today, he says, it's impossible to dogsled to the North Pole without bringing some kind of floatation device. You just can't rely any longer on the ice being solid all the way up.
But one of the most disturbing things Steger showed us was how global warming disintegrates glaciers. This isn't just about the melting that happens on top of the ice. It's really about what's happening below. Glaciers aren't a solid mass. Because they move, they're riddled with cracks and crevasses. When snow and ice on top of the glacier turns into water, there are plenty of ways for that water to seep down to the bottom of the glacier. Once there, the water acts as a lubricant. It makes it easier for the front of the glacier to break off and melt away into nothing.
You can watch that process happen in real time, as meltwater helps to break apart a glacier in a time-lapse video filmed between March 27, 2007 and March 4, 2012. About halfway though, the video reverses. As the glacier "rebuilds" itself, you really get the full impact of what's happened, and what is still happening, to our Arctic ice sheets.
See more videos of melting ice filmed by the Extreme Ice Survey.
Learn more about the global outlook for ice and snow.
Learn more about how climate change is affecting the Arctic at the Will Steger Foundation website.
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:36 am • •
I love this video of an iceberg collapsing in on itself in Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica. (Word of warning, the people filming this loved the experience even more than I loved watching it, so much so that you may want to turn your speakers down.)
There are two kinds of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. The tabular ones are what they sound like, big flat sheets of ice. Non-tabular are different—irregular shapes that become even more irregular as bits and pieces of them melt. Judging by the arched shape this iceberg had taken on, it probably falls into the non-tabular category. Implosion happens when melting weakens key structural support within that shape and bits of the iceberg begin to crash in on itself, accelerating the breakup. Both tabular and non-tabular icebergs and catastrophically fail like this, though.
Another fun iceberg fact: There are six size categories we sort icebergs by. Four of them have pretty predictable names: "Small", "Medium", "Large", and "Very Large". But below "small" are two size categories with a little more whimsy.
Icebergs with a hight of less than 3.3 feet and a length less than 16 feet are called "Growlers".
If the height shorter than 16 feet and the length shorter than 49 feet, then the iceberg is called, adorably, "a Bergy Bit". Yes, that is a technical term.
Via Pourmecoffee
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:23 am • •
Numbers can be powerful things, but they don't necessarily help the average person grasp what's actually going on in science. Instead, personal stories tend to make a bigger impact. And that's understandable. Things you can see—or things that someone can show you—are going to stick in your head a bit more than a barrage of data.
This is especially a problem, I think, with climate change. Some of the largest impact of climate change, so far, have happened in places far removed from the experiences of the people who create the most anthropogenic greenhouse gases. So it's often hard to take the idea "the Earth is getting warmer" and really grok what that actually means.
That's why people like Will Steger are important. Steger is an explorer and science communicator who has won the National Geographic Society's John Oliver La Gorce Medal—an award that's also been given to Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen and Jacques Cousteau.
He does most of his work in the Arctic and Antarctic, places where he has clearly seen the results of climate change. In a video of a presentation at the University of Minnesota, Steger shows you his experiences—and what they mean. How has climate change altered the landscape of the poles? What does that mean for the future of the Earth? Steger does a good job of making the data feel like something real.
I wish I could figure out how to embed this, but you should go watch it, nonetheless. It's a long video, but worth the time.
Image: Ice berg melting., a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from dkeats's photostream
Rob Beschizza at 8:05 am • •
Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) seizes domains in similar fashion to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But whereas American authorities' placeholders are all businesslike neoclassicism, Britain's look like something a phisher would email to scare you into giving up your PayPal password. The daftest part? Showing you your browser environment data, then threatening the operator of your Tor exit node with prosecution.
It's almost as if the only point of surveillance was to intimidate people!
Yet it proceeds from crude threats to the strangest abstraction. Imagine this messaging applied to actual counterfeit goods: "As a result of imported medications, young, emerging scientists may have had their careers damaged. If you have illegally bought medications online you will have damaged the future of the international pharmaceutical industry."
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:19 pm • •
This clip from the BBC's Frozen Planet is one of the most amazing things you will ever see.
"Brinicle" is a clever portmanteau for an icy finger of death that forms naturally in the very cold seawater one finds around Earth's poles. A crust of sea ice can form on top of this water, and that's the first step to making a brinicle. Here's how polar oceanographer Mark Brandon explained the process in an article on the BBC website:
In winter, the air temperature above the sea ice can be below -20C, whereas the sea water is only about -1.9C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The salt in this newly formed ice is concentrated and pushed into the brine channels. And because it is very cold and salty, it is denser than the water beneath.
The result is the brine sinks in a descending plume. But as this extremely cold brine leaves the sea ice, it freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. This forms a fragile tube of ice around the descending plume, which grows into what has been called a brinicle.
Check out that BBC website link for more information on how the Frozen Planet videographers captured this footage. That's also where you should go to watch the video when this YouTube version is inevitably taken down.
Thank you, Brittany. Truly freaking amazing.
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:04 am • •
Dayton's Wall is an underwater geologic formation named for Paul Dayton, a marine ecologist who studies the lives and interactions between seafloor-dwelling organisms. Located in Antarctica, in an area of the Ross Sea between McMurdo Station and Cape Armitage, Dayton's Wall is a great place to spot creatures that live on the rocky Antarctic seafloor.
This footage of life on Dayton's Wall was shot by Henry Kaiser, a man with a really awesome CV. Kaiser is a musician and filmmaker, and for the last decade he's also worked as a research diver, conducting dives beneath the Antarctic sea ice on behalf of scientists stationed at McMurdo.
Kaiser has turned some of his footage into music videos, set to songs performed by Nik Bärtsch's RONIN. With the artist's permission, Kaiser made two music videos. This one, and another set just beneath the surface of the ice. They're both beautiful and haunting, and make me want to find out more about Nik Bärtsch's RONIN, who I'd never heard of before.
We'll have more from Henry Kaiser soon, including an upcoming guest blog post. Watch this space for Antarctic wonders. And, in the meantime, check out his YouTube page. He posts new videos every day.
Cory Doctorow at 4:07 pm • •
The ACLU of Tennessee has brought suit against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a warrantless raid on an apartment complex where ICE officers believed some illegal immigrants were housed. After ICE agents broke into the complex and were asked for a warrant, one agent reportedly said, "We don't need a warrant, we're ICE," and, gesturing to his genitals, "the warrant is coming out of my balls."
Among the plaintiffs are U.S. citizens, including a child detained and interrogated while playing soccer on the playground simply because of the color of his skin. Looking Latino and speaking Spanish is not enough to justify probable cause for questioning and arresting a person. Another plaintiff was carted away in handcuffs in front of his frightened and crying children.
Unfortunately, the Clairmont raid is not an isolated incident. As the Department of Homeland Security and its enforcement arm, ICE, expand their aggressive immigration enforcement policies, all too often the constitutional rights afforded to everyone living in the United States are violated. Even as ICE carries out its mission, it must act in accordance with the law and in a manner that is humane.
(via Reddit)
