In many ways, life on Earth as we know it depends on ice. It provides most of the world’s fresh water supply, keeps global sea levels from rising disastrously and gives us vital data about past and future climate. Here are a few more intriguing facts about ice, both on our planet and beyond.
Dry ice
It’s frozen carbon dioxide, which can change from a solid to a gas at room temperature and pressure without going through a liquid state.
Some of the best-preserved mummies were frozen
from the Andes to the Alps, frozen human remains allow us fascinating glimpses of how people lived hundreds and thousands of years ago.
- La Doncella, an Incan teenager, and Ötzi the Iceman, a 5300-year-old corpse
ICE CORES Tell a Fascinating History of the Earth
Glaciers are a vast resource of information about conditions on Earth over hundreds of thousands of years
- Climatologists drill cylinder-shaped samples of ice from glaciers and analyze the dust, minerals, ash, gas bubbles and human-made pollutants that have collected in snow
- From this data, they can determine details about things as varied as forest fires, volcanic activity, sea ice extent, solar variability and atmospheric circulation
ICE PAVED THE WAY FOR MODERN REFRIGERATION
The use of ice for food preservation has been around for millennia.
- In the early 1800s, ice harvesting as an industry took hold as horse-drawn ice cutters pulled thick blocks of ice from frozen lakes for use in insulated ice houses and cellars
- By the late 19th century, household iceboxes, forerunners to the electric refrigerator, were common
Icebergs and glaciers don’t just come in white
White light is made up of a rainbow of colors and each has a different wavelength.
The Cryosphhere is what we call ICE on Earth
It includes not only all types of frozen water, but permafrost, which is soil that has existed below freezing for extended periods of time, but doesn’t necessarily have any water.
- The NOAA breaks it down as the “frozen water part of the Earth system.”
Water is usually denser than ice
In liquid water, molecules are able to fill in gaps and pack themselves in more closely than in the crystalline structure of ice, which makes ice less dense and therefore able to float on water.
- Heavy water ice (where the hydrogen atoms have a proton and a neutron) does sink because the water molecules themselves become heavier thanks to heavier hydrogen atoms, and the hydrogens form stronger bonds.
Ice storms happen when snow passes through warm and cold layers
Snow enters a warm layer of the atmosphere and melts into drops of rain, then passes through a cold layer of air.
- The rain drops don’t have time to refreeze as they fall through this thin cold layer, turning to ice when they hit a cold surface.
Melting glaciers are a problem
More than two-thirds of Earth’s fresh water is stored in glaciers
ICE DOESN’T ONLY EXIST ON EARTH
Depending on their proximity to the Sun, different planets in the solar system have different amounts of water.
- Those furthest from the Sun have much more water than those closer to it, like Earth, Mercury and Mars, where high temperatures make it harder for hydrogen and oxygen to form water molecules.
There Have Been Many ICE AGES on Earth
Many others occurred before humans arrived on the scene, and they were often much more severe.
- Some theorize that some ice ages were caused by the evolution of new life forms, such as plants and multi-celled organisms, which changed atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations.
Greenland
It’s the second largest ice mass on Earth after the Antarctic ice sheet, and it contains enough water to raise ocean levels by at least 20 feet.
- The Greenland ice sheet’s melt rate is accelerating at a sobering rate
- Scientists are studying Greenland’s ice sheet to document its past behavior in the hopes of better understanding how it may respond to climate change
There’s SUCH A THING as an ICE VOLCANO.
Enceladus’ southern polar region contains “cryovolcanoes” – an exotic type of geyser thats spews ice instead of magma. It happens when ice deep below the surface gets heated and turned into a vapor that then erupts into the moon’s chilly atmosphere as ice particles.
ICE ON MARS COULD HOLD THE KEY TO LIFE ON THE PLANET
Satellites tell us that Mars stores its ice in polar ice caps, permafrost, and on a handful of glaciers
- Until recently, it was thought that the current extremely low temperatures and thin atmosphere of the planet prevented water from existing in its liquid state, but in 2015, NASA scientists reported compelling evidence that briny water is still present on Mars
There are a lot of different names for ice
Sea ice alone comes in myriad varieties
- Arctic and Antarctic sea ice have their own distinct vocabularies
- In addition, the Inupiaq of Alaska have more than 100 unique terms for ice, some of which are quite complicated
