ROOM TEMPERATURE ICE is possible if the water molecules you’re freezing are submitted to a high enough electric field. Some physicists had predicted that water could be coaxed into freezing at fields around 10^9 V/m. The fields are thought to trigger the formation of ordered hydrogen bonding needed for crystallization. Now, for the first time, such freezing has been observed, in the lab of Heon Kang at Seoul National University in Korea, at room temperature and at a much lower field than was expected, only 10^6 V/m. Exploring a new freezing mechanism should lead to additional insights about ice formation in various natural settings, Kang believes (surfion@snu.ac.kr). The field-assisted room-temperature freezing took place in cramped quarters: the water molecules were constrained to the essentially 2-dimensional enclosure between two surfaces: a gold substrate and the gold tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Nevertheless, the experimental conditions in this case, modest electric field and narrow spatial gap, might occur in nature. Fields of the size of 10^6 V/m are, for example, are thought to exist in thunderclouds, in some tiny rock crevices, and in certain nanometer electrical devices. (Choi et al., Physical Review Letters, 19 August 2005; for another example of seemingly room-temperature ice, see http://www.aip.org/pnu/1995/split/pnu225-1.htm ). Source: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News, Number 742 August 19, 2005 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and Davide Castelvecchi.

(…) The rest is ice. Far hence, where, most severe,
Bleak Winter well-nigh saddens all the year
Their infant growth began. He bade arise
Their uncouth forms, portentous in our eyes.
Oft as, dissolved by transient Suns, the snow
Left the tall cliff to join the flood below,
He caught and curdled with a freezing blast
The current ere it reach’d the boundless waste.
By slow degrees uprose the wond’rous pile,
And long successive ages roll’d the while,
Till, ceaseless in its growth, it claim’d to stand
Tall as its rival mountains on the land.
Thus stood, and unremoveable by skill
Or force of man, has stood the structure still,
But that, though firmly fixt, supplanted yet
By pressure of its enormous weight
It left the shelving beach, and with a sound
That shook the bellowing caves and rocks around.
Self-launched and swiftly to the briney wave,
As if instinct with strong desire to lave
Down went the pond’rous mass. (….)

An excerpt from William Cowper’s poem “On the Ice-Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean,” from A Quark for Mister Mark : 101 poems about science, edited by Maurice Riordan and Jon Turney.

An even better question is “What DAY is it in Antarctica? ( and do penguins care?). Check [TimeandDate.com -> http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/custom.html?cities=159,179,951,1032 ] to synchronize your watches….

Warhol: “Because the more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”

Neutrinos in the news! Read this physics article: Talk discusses catching mighty mass.

In related news, the ICE-Cube project (a neutrino-detection high-energy neutrino observatory being built and installed in the clear deep ice below the South Pole Station) will continue construction work this season! For more information, see http://icecube.wisc.edu/

In a recent informal poll, 82% of respondents said they [AGREE] or [STRONGLY AGREE] with the statement “Antarctica is located somewhere near Siberia.”  In a related story, most people cannot read a compass, and grade school “geography” has turned into a “social studies” curriculum that does not include map studies.  Will mapping tools like GoogleEarth reverse this trend?

“New investigations of the spreading of Earth’s crust in Antarctica may change existing estimates of tectonic plate motion around the Pacific Ocean Basin. ”

Note: I am looking forward to meeting members of a science team doing neotectonic research work in the Ross area — their ongoing project is Transantarctic Mountains Deformation Network: GPS Measurements of Neotectonic Motion in the Antarctic Interior: “GPS measurements of bedrock crustal motions in an extended TAMDEF network to document neotectonic displacements due to tectonic deformation within the West Antarctic rift and/or to mass change of the Antarctic ice sheets.” Is it just me, or is “isostatic uplift” the most amazing phenomenon?

Read the full article in Science Daily.

A new study, funded in part by the Naval Research Laboratory and NASA, reports that exhaust from the space shuttle can create high-altitude clouds over Antarctica mere days following launch, providing valuable insight to global transport processes in the lower thermosphere. The same study also finds that the shuttle’s main engine exhaust plume carries small quantities of iron that can be observed from the ground, half a world away.
- Courtesy: SpaceDaily (Washington DC Jul 07, 2005)

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
- Niels Bohr

I am able to post messages to this journal by email.
K.