Ian
priscilla 1Ice
February 6th 2009 12:32
Thanks to the Readers Digest, here are some very different ways of looking at ice!
Recent satellite photos have shown the alarming rate at which Greenland's glaciers are melting. Six members of the elite French High Risk Mountain Military Squad got a closer look. Lowering themselves into one of the mills carved by a river of melted ice, they used nothing but picks and crampons to climb back out. While their daredevil antics fit right into their mission to "master extreme weather conditions and physical challenges," they were also, under the guidance of expedition scientists, gathering data on how icebergs break apart.
It sure looked like ice on Mars in photos such as this one, taken by a European Space Agency probe in 2005, of a 22-mile-wide crater near the Red Planet's north pole. But it wasn't until last year, when a robotic lander scooped up and successfully vaporized samples, that scientists confirmed the presence of a frozen layer of ice two inches underground. The evidence, says NASA project scientist Leslie Tamppari, "increases the possibility that the planet may have been conducive to life." Next step: analysing whether the ice might have melted within the last hundred thousand years. If so, there's an even greater chance that plant or animal life did indeed exist.
Photographer Laura Millard captured the ephemeral beauty of these naturally occurring "frost flowers" on a lake in Banff, Alberta, Canada. While it's hard to find such brief blooms, you'll have the most luck on a newly frozen lake just after nightfall. It's then that warm air condenses around a speck on the colder surface of the lake, similar to the way a snowflake is formed. But look, don't touch! The crystals are nearly as fragile as a snowflake too.
It takes 500 tons of ice, 15,000 tons of snow, 35 artisans, and one month to build Quebec's Hôtel de Glace, which opens in January and accepts overnight guests through mid-March. With design details like a massive ice chandelier and a full-service bar where everything comes on the rocks, the hotel attracts 70,000 visitors a year. And yes, after dogsledding on the grounds, some guests do actually spend the night-in Arctic sleeping bags atop ice-carved beds. Can't tolerate the 23-degree indoor temperature without getting the shivers? The hotel's romance package includes a separate room at a nearby (brick-and-mortar) inn.
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