The different colors [of water] again refer to the fact that those little jacks, if you want to call them jacks, those little pyramids, can be packed together in all different ways. And depending on how they're packed together.If you Google blue ice, as I did just while your caller was asking his question, you see some beautiful pictures of ice covering a lake.

Ira Flatow

Categorized in : Beautiful Blue Lakes

People tend to romanticize what they can't quite remember. by Ira Flatow

People tend to romanticize what they can't quite remember.

remember people

Form follows finances instead of function. by Ira Flatow

Form follows finances instead of function.

function finance form

There's something very magical about water and what happens to it when it freezes. I don't think there's anything else in the world, perhaps in our universe, that is quite like ice.

ice water thinking

Ice is remarkable in many ways. A simple experiment one can do at home is to add salt to an amount of water in different concentrations. For example, one can mimic the concentration of the ocean, or one can make it even saltier.

ocean simple home

Mainly, of course, if you're not an ice climber, where you really need ice, for most people ice is a damn nuisance. And we just can't wait for it to all melt.And it's always a remarkable fact that it takes so long to melt because the temperature of the air can be well above the freezing point, and the ice is still solid there. So for most people, that's the experience.

ice air long

H2O it's a complicated, three-dimensional, charged object. And one can pack these things in many different ways, a little like playing the child's game of jacks, where those complicated little objects can be thrown together in all different ways.

games together children

The principal reason it transforms is that water is a collection of molecules, H2O, every child learns that.And that bond has the property that as the bonds get stronger when you cool water, the ice expands.

ice water children

Normally, you would not call ice a mineral. by Ira Flatow

Normally, you would not call ice a mineral.

minerals ice

Amorphous forms [of ice], for example, are found naturally on comets, on asteroids, and the crystalline forms are found on Earth or at least could be made on Earth with enough pressure. Nothing else does this.

ice example doe

I think the most remarkable thing about ice, in my opinion at least, is that it occurs in many, many, many different forms. Most solids occur in typically one or maybe two or three different forms, and ice has approximately 15 different crystal forms, as well as two forms that are called amorphous, which means without any shape at all.

two mean thinking

I love ice, when I was in Antarctica many decades ago, I got to see a lot of ice. And the one thing that impressed me -because I love to talk about ice - is that it has a color.

antarctica ice color