[Note: This post is about the noun “Ice” and not the acronym “I.C.E.”
It also contains a couple of scientific facts that are probably of very little interest to you. Please bear with me!]
I started this post during the Winter Olympics, but my momentum melted away and I never finished it. With temperatures this week nearing 100 degrees and humidity nearing 90%, I thought writing about ice might help me cool off. So, here’s take two.
It’s pretty obvious why the Winter Olympics would make me think of ice. While watching the games, I learned something about ice that I didn’t know before. In winter sports, all ice is not created equal. It depends on the sport.
- Curling needs ice sheets with a pebbled texture so the surface is sprayed with water droplets that freeze on the ice.
- Ice hockey requires a harder surface in order to allow athletes to stop in an instant when needed.
- Speed skating requires a thin hard surface of ice, the coldest of all Olympic ice sports.
- Figure Skating needs ice that is warmer and has a softer surface for figure skating to cushion landings.
Even if you’re not sports-minded, ice is also interesting because of its physical properties. Unlike almost all other things, when water freezes, it expands! So, when a lake freezes, the ice expands, becomes less dense than water, and floats on the top. Imagine how difficult it would be to skate if the ice contracted, became more dense than water, and sank to the bottom. Olympic ice skaters would have to wear scuba gear to compete!
Since water expands when it freezes, the ice needs to spread out to an area larger than that occupied by the lake. When trying to do that, the ice becomes trapped and buckles up to form pressure ridges. They could be a problem for ice skaters but the ridges take up very little space and are usually very easy to get around.
Fortunately for those of us who enjoy winter, you don’t have to be an Olympian to enjoy ice. In my case, Madison sits in the middle of four lakes — Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa — so there’s plenty of ice in the winter. According to the Madison Parks Department, the “Ho-Chunk Nation called this area Taychopera (land of four lakes) and considered it their home.” I happen to live on Taychopera Road two blocks from Lake Mendota, the largest of the four lakes. In the winter, I have 9,781 additional acres for my walks.
It’s rare that the ice on the lakes is smooth and clear, so walking on the ice is not like walking on a slab of cement. When I took the picture above, it looked to me like a river of ice flowing toward the distant ice boat. Bubbles, cracks, refrozen broken ice and patterns in the snow all add interest, so I like to walk around and search for interesting cracks and patterns.
If you happen to be hanging out by big lakes, you might run into big piles of ice called ice shoves. The photos below were taken on the northeast side of Washington Island, Wisconsin. The prevailing winds broke up much of the surface ice and piled it along the shore. Some of these piles were 10 – 15 feet high, but piles up to 40 feet have been formed under the right conditions. When ice gets shoved onto shorelines by strong winds, the piles can cause property damage.
You shouldn’t always look down, however, because there are often interesting ice formations above you. Here are some great icicles. The icicles in the sunshine were photographed through a window screen which added interesting lines to the image. Under a corrugated metal roof, the icicles began to slide away from the edge of the roof as the frozen snow on the roof began to slide off. When we stayed in a hotel on Washington Island one winter, over 20″ of snow fell one night. That created some amazing icicles the next day that made it difficult to open the front door!
According to the American Chemical Society (and I trust them because I’ve been a member for about 50 years), “So far, scientists have experimentally determined the crystal structures for 19 types of ice. Or maybe 20, depending on who you ask.”
If you’re a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, you might have read his novel, Cat’s Cradle. In that story, Dr. Felix Hoenikker invents Ice-nine at the request of the U.S. marines in order to solve the “problem” of mud. The trouble is that it melts at 114.4 F. If it comes into contact with water cooler than that, even the water that’s in your body, it causes that water to freeze. That’s quite a problem.
You will not be tested on this material, so if you’ve made it to the end of this post, you might want to look for this ice.
