IceScapes
If someone could have sat very still unblinking in the cold dark Monday night, in a few hours they would have watched the metamorphosis of Goose Creek as it changed into its winter skin. And I would ask this determined someone "where does it begin?"
Does ice grow inward from the edges? Doe it build around jutting rocks, or start everywhere at once as if the White Witch suddenly cast a spell that turned loose liquid into solid crystal?
It is crystal, you know. As liquid water cools towards freezing, a new order takes over. Tiny hydrogens begin sticking to lumbering oxygen molecules in a new and very precise arrangement, one molecule fitting in just so in the growing lattice. A framework takes a six-sided shape in the perfect order that we see most clearly in the amazing shapes of snow flakes.
Water moves toward this crystalline state as the temperature falls towards zero and its molecules move slower and slower. As it cools towards zero, because of its precise laws of chemical partnership between these simple atoms of H and O--who would have thought?--it becomes less dense and expands! And so Goose Creek's frozen skin lifts above the usual water line, not below. Because of this universal feature of water, winter lakes and oceans don't ice up from bottom to top. How wonderfully convenient for aquatic life on earth!
If I had the discipline, the will, and enough hot coffee, I could see if for myself. I could be there next year on the first night that the creek freezes over to witness it form and flow toward me like cold lava of glacial ice--thicker, wider, white, then clear. It would be an education.
Comments
I remember a river in Alaska that was in the process of shutting down. Every morning there would be a little ice shelf on the banks, both sides, with the river rushing down the middle. Every day, the river was an inch or two lower than its little shelf, the shelves stacking up as the river carried less and less water.
Posted by: trish | December 21, 2004 9:03 AM
I can almost see it freezing.
Take Care
Michael
Posted by: Michael | December 21, 2004 9:18 AM
The universe is full of so many quiet, unseen, and tremendously important processes. Everything works as it should, as it must, and generally, whether we observe it or not (forgive me Heisenberg). But if we observe, if we truly see, changes are also wrought in us.
Posted by: lghunsucker | December 21, 2004 11:18 AM
I remember a classic story of a boy found that a cup of warm milk get freeze faster than a cup of cold milk. Pretty interesting when read that back in highschool.
Posted by: kopuschen | December 22, 2004 12:37 PM