Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with
Speaker 3: part two of our look at Strange Ice. Now, initially
Speaker 3: we didn't know this was going to be a two
Speaker 3: part series. Last time, we looked at odd ice formations
Speaker 3: that can occur on Earth, such as the main one
Speaker 3: I looked at was this thing called nieves penitentes or
Speaker 3: just penitentes, which are these very strange sort of blades
Speaker 3: or spikes or pinnacles of ice that you can sometimes
Speaker 3: find in high mountain ranges, especially in the dry Andies.
Speaker 3: And we looked at a historical anecdote of Charles Darwin
Speaker 3: trekking across the Andes and coming across a field of
Speaker 3: these things, one that had a horse frozen inside it.
Speaker 3: But we also looked at ice formations such as ball ice,
Speaker 3: candle ice, rotten ice, and a lot of other creepy, interesting,
Speaker 3: physically counterintuitive ways that ice can form or decompose. And
Speaker 3: so we're coming back today to talk some more about
Speaker 3: strange ice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess this episode's kind of a release valve.
Speaker 2: From the last episode, there were a number of threads
Speaker 2: that had come up in our research that we just
Speaker 2: had to continue to pursue. So some of these are
Speaker 2: definitely still going to deal with direct examples of ice
Speaker 2: manifesting in a way that we might think of as weird,
Speaker 2: behaving in a way that some people might think of
Speaker 2: as weird. But we'll also get into some I thought
Speaker 2: very fascinating and haunting folk traditions concerning the ice. All right,
Speaker 2: what have you got, rob, So in the last episode
Speaker 2: we discussed mostly in passing the dangers of ice, specifically
Speaker 2: coastal sea ice and any sort of icy environment that
Speaker 2: humans will attempt to traverse or in any way exploit
Speaker 2: for hunting, fishing, recreation, scientific purposes. Specifically thinking about rotten ice,
Speaker 2: you know the idea that it's just not safe to
Speaker 2: venture upon. And I imagine we have plenty of listeners
Speaker 2: out there who grew up in places with icy environments
Speaker 2: who can attest to the dangers of ice that I mean,
Speaker 2: there are just so many ways that it can potentially
Speaker 2: be dangerous. There's, of course, you know the fact that
Speaker 2: ice can be slippery, you can fall, and if you
Speaker 2: fall on ice, it is hard, and you know that
Speaker 2: can hurt you as well. Then you get into areas
Speaker 2: where ice may give way. It may plunge us into
Speaker 2: freezing water, It may plunge us into hollow areas where
Speaker 2: the water is drained out, and so forth. There are
Speaker 2: so many ways that ice can pose a danger. Ice
Speaker 2: can also just be physically heavy as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the danger of plunging through ice into a hazard
Speaker 3: below is not only the case on say like a
Speaker 3: frozen pond or lake or something. But think about what
Speaker 3: happened to that horse that Charles Darwin came across. We
Speaker 3: don't know, but he speculated, well, maybe when the snow
Speaker 3: was packed higher, it somehow like fell into a hole
Speaker 3: or crevasse in the ice and then and then died
Speaker 3: like that, and then the rest of it sublimated away
Speaker 3: around it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you don't even have to have really extreme
Speaker 2: environments for potentially dangerous examples of this from occurring. Like
Speaker 2: I remember as a kid encountering situations where you'd have
Speaker 2: like a bog or you know, a marshy area, and
Speaker 2: you would have a situation where you would have this
Speaker 2: sort of ice cap on top and I guess like
Speaker 2: the water drained down during the melting, and so you'd
Speaker 2: have this this thin layer of ice on top and
Speaker 2: you could fall down through it potentially or climb down
Speaker 2: through it and play in it as a child. And
Speaker 2: so yeah, that's I guess that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that we'll be getting into here, is like ice creates
Speaker 2: unique environments that, especially to a child, can be as
Speaker 2: intriguing as they are potentially hazardous.
Speaker 3: I'm just thinking now about little rob climbing down through
Speaker 3: the ice to play in the bog. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was part of my childhood. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it should come as no surprise that there are
Speaker 2: traditional tales and folk traditions seemingly meant to keep children
Speaker 2: away from ice, Because again, ice is great fun, children
Speaker 2: are curious, and since time out of Mind parents have
Speaker 2: invented and passed down tales of perhaps more embodied threats
Speaker 2: monsters to scare children away from potentially dangerous environments. Now
Speaker 2: this may ring a bell because we discussed one of
Speaker 2: these on the podcast a few years back. This would
Speaker 2: be Jenny Green Teeth, a river hag of English folklore
Speaker 2: widely understood as a kind of nursery boogie to keep
Speaker 2: children away from the water's edge bogie rather not boogie.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think Jenny could be used to warn children
Speaker 3: of the dangers of water in multiple environments. But the
Speaker 3: one that I remember being really salient was like in
Speaker 3: certain regions of England, there might be places where there
Speaker 3: were holes or pits in the ground, maybe maral pits
Speaker 3: or something like that, that had been hollowed out and
Speaker 3: then filled in with water. And sometimes this water would
Speaker 3: have coverings of like algae or plant matter or something
Speaker 3: on top of it that would just make it look
Speaker 3: very green, make it look like it was just you know,
Speaker 3: a continuation of the grass almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And you know to your point, you know,
Speaker 2: once you have a folk creation like this, it can
Speaker 2: be deployed in various ways. It can sort of take
Speaker 2: on different meanings and different stressors in different stories. But
Speaker 2: there are many variations on this theme in global traditions
Speaker 2: where there's some sort of supernatural being that is associated
Speaker 2: with the water and the dangers of the water, especially
Speaker 2: for young children. The Japanese Kappa is one that we've
Speaker 2: also discussed in the past that sometimes takes on these connotations.
Speaker 2: And then of course this is another thing we're discussed
Speaker 2: in the show before. There's, of course, the nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: three British public information film Lonely Water, also known as
Speaker 2: the Spirit of Dark and Only Water, featuring the voice
Speaker 2: of Donald Pleasance. This very much carries on the tradition here,
Speaker 2: and it's often discussed as something that traumatized an entire
Speaker 2: generation of British children.
Speaker 3: It sounds like it worked. I mean, are you going
Speaker 3: to go play in the flooded mind pits now?
Speaker 2: Yeah? You know. It's a complicated topic though, the use
Speaker 2: of boogiemen and boogie women, I guess to frightened children.
Speaker 2: I remember reading about some of the works of Francisco
Speaker 2: Goya in which he was criticizing this and taught and
Speaker 2: like tying in this whole idea that like, by having
Speaker 2: parents that invoke supernatural threats to keep children in line,
Speaker 2: they're not only potentially protecting their child from these threats,
Speaker 2: but they're also instilling supernatural belief at an early age
Speaker 2: that then, you know, matures and becomes these other modes
Speaker 2: of supernatural belief that to some may be seen as
Speaker 2: more harmful in their adulthood.
Speaker 3: So, like his ideas, if you teach a child to
Speaker 3: fear spectral dangers, even if it's useful in keeping them
Speaker 3: away from a real physical danger in childhood, maybe they
Speaker 3: just grow up to continue to project spectral dangers that
Speaker 3: are not necessary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe that's the argument. Though. Of course, this
Speaker 2: is a complicated issue, so you know, obviously it's there
Speaker 2: are a lot of a lot of ins and outs here,
Speaker 2: so I don't want to simplify it too much. But
Speaker 2: it's interesting to think about, like, what does it mean
Speaker 2: when you introduce something like this? What does it mean
Speaker 2: when you introduces something that's not even tied to scaring
Speaker 2: children so much, like something like like a Santa Claus
Speaker 2: or Easter bunny? You know what effect does that have?
Speaker 2: And of course you know a lot has been written
Speaker 2: and continues to be written and said about this. So anyway,
Speaker 2: given all of this, she comes no surprise that there
Speaker 2: are traditions that involve creating supernatural entities or monstrous entities
Speaker 2: that are associated with the dangers of ice and keeping
Speaker 2: children away from the ice. So I want to turn
Speaker 2: to a couple of these from Native American First Nations traditions.
Speaker 2: The first of these is the Abo damkin. This I
Speaker 2: was reading about this in the Dictionary of Native American
Speaker 2: Mythology by Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan. This
Speaker 2: is apparently an entity in the traditions of the Malaset
Speaker 2: and passima Quadi people in what is now the Canadian
Speaker 2: province of New Brunswick and the US state of Maine.
Speaker 2: The authors here describe it as a boogie monster with
Speaker 2: long hair and huge teeth. Quote, fear of him keeps
Speaker 2: small children from straying on thin newly from was an
Speaker 2: ice in the winter and unguarded beaches in the summer.
Speaker 3: Oh, so is this creature in the water?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I was looking for more information on this
Speaker 2: and according to Native Languages as Native hyphen Languages dot org.
Speaker 2: It is also sometimes sometimes described as a fanged sea serpent,
Speaker 2: sometimes with like long red hair, and some accounts say
Speaker 2: that it might have once been a human woman and
Speaker 2: was transformed into the state. And despite the fact that
Speaker 2: some Western interpretations apparently have classified this is a kind
Speaker 2: of vampire, it is actually better thought of as a
Speaker 2: sea monster. So, yeah, this would be something that dwells
Speaker 2: within the water. Now, another one that I was reading
Speaker 2: about this one. There's also a number of you may
Speaker 2: be familiar with. Is the Qualipeluit. This is an entity
Speaker 2: in the traditions of the Inuit, and there's an excellent
Speaker 2: ride up about it on the Kikwitani Inuit Association's Inuit
Speaker 2: Myths and Legends website Inuit Myths dot Com, which features
Speaker 2: some just haunting artwork and also text that is available
Speaker 2: in both English and Inuit. Joe I included one of
Speaker 2: these images from the website here that is just absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, extremely Oh no, and it's it's like snatching a baby.
Speaker 2: That's what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The website describes
Speaker 2: them as scaly marine humanoids that reek of sulfur, and yeah,
Speaker 2: they snatch children. They prey on children who play alone
Speaker 2: on the beach or get too close to breaking ice.
Speaker 2: They may also feature pouches on their back to stuff
Speaker 2: children in though I couldn't tell. It seemed ambiguous based
Speaker 2: on the entry and based on the illustrations. There are
Speaker 2: a couple of additional illustrations on the website. Whether this
Speaker 2: pouch is in their clothing or if this is a
Speaker 2: pouch in their body. Here's a haunting excerpt from the
Speaker 2: Inuitmiths dot com website. Quote usually the Qualiteluit jump out
Speaker 2: of the water and grab children with about any warning. Sometimes, however,
Speaker 2: you can hear them knocking under the ice. Some elders
Speaker 2: have said that if the ocean begins to become wavy
Speaker 2: in an area, or steam begins to rise from the ocean,
Speaker 2: aqulllipi lutt might be hiding underneath the water.
Speaker 3: This one is so scary.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I love the idea that of one
Speaker 2: of these creatures underneath the ice, like tapping or knocking
Speaker 2: at it, especially.
Speaker 3: Especially because if you ever do have experiences out on
Speaker 3: ice over a frozen body of water, you can hear
Speaker 3: strange sounds emanating from below.
Speaker 2: That's right, right, And one of the things we'll get
Speaker 2: into here in a bit is things that can suddenly
Speaker 2: occur that also have sounds regarding the ice, especially the
Speaker 2: ice close to the shore. So the direct line was
Speaker 2: not made between these two topics and the material I
Speaker 2: was looking at, But I can't help but think about
Speaker 2: it now that I've researched it a little bit. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I highly recommend inuitmths dot com. The website features profiles
Speaker 2: and a handful of other mythological beam and creatures, including
Speaker 2: the two Knit who I mentioned in a recent Monster
Speaker 2: Fact episode. Wow, all right, so I mentioned the ice
Speaker 2: making sounds. So I want to move on now to
Speaker 2: the topic of what is known as ice shove. Now,
Speaker 2: this is more of a clear example of weird ice,
Speaker 2: or rather ice behaving in a way that many myths
Speaker 2: might think of as weird. Though for a number of
Speaker 2: you out there, ice shove is just a reality, potential
Speaker 2: reality of the winter months. I was reading about this
Speaker 2: in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and he mentions there's a
Speaker 2: whole passage where he's talking about like long stillness broken
Speaker 2: by sudden movement as sort of a hallmark of Arctic landscapes,
Speaker 2: and he ties this also into just like a sense
Speaker 2: of patience that is also that he observed as being
Speaker 2: present in native populations and indigenous peoples. But he cites
Speaker 2: an example of this ice shove concerning the breaking of
Speaker 2: both river ice and sea ice, and for river ice,
Speaker 2: Lowez describes it as follows, quote pistol reports of cracking
Speaker 2: on the river, and then the sound of breaking branches
Speaker 2: and the whining pop of a fallen tree is the
Speaker 2: careening blocks of ice gouge the river banks. And he
Speaker 2: describes the sea ice variation as follows quote, Suddenly, in
Speaker 2: the middle of winter, and without warning, a huge piece
Speaker 2: of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive,
Speaker 2: and he cites the inopiat word ivo. I hope I'm
Speaker 2: pronouncing that right. My apologies for any mispronunciations on these terms.
Speaker 2: And it is also known as ice shove. I've also
Speaker 2: seen it referred to as ice tsunamis, along with a
Speaker 2: number of other English names. Ice shoves are generally classified
Speaker 2: as onshore ice pushes caused by wind currents, changes in temperature,
Speaker 2: and other causes. As meteorologist Matthew Capucci explained it in
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty Washington Post article, there are a lot
Speaker 2: of explainers out these out there that often pop up
Speaker 2: when exceptional or notable examples of ice shoves occur, and
Speaker 2: this I believe is one of those cases. This meteorologist
Speaker 2: pointed out that as the wind blows over a long
Speaker 2: sheet of ice, it can give that sheet of ice
Speaker 2: enough momentum that it can't stop when pushed against the shore. Instead,
Speaker 2: it fragments, and then the fragments pile up in heaps
Speaker 2: of shattered ice on the coast. Conditions have to be
Speaker 2: just right. The ice has to be thin enough, it
Speaker 2: has to be brittle enough, and it generally only piles
Speaker 2: up a few feet onto the shore. But there are
Speaker 2: of course exceptional examples where things get much higher, or
Speaker 2: they go up the shore a little bit more. Apparently
Speaker 2: some places are more ideal for it. I saw Lake
Speaker 2: Erie pointed out in this article due to its length
Speaker 2: and particular orientation, and again there's some pretty exceptional examples.
Speaker 2: In June of twenty eleven, along the Chuckchisea coast in Alaska,
Speaker 2: ice shove piled up fifteen feet, and I've seen it
Speaker 2: record heights as high as like forty feet in some cases.
Speaker 2: So that's like a forty foot wall of ice fragments
Speaker 2: piling up along the coast.
Speaker 3: Yikes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And Lopez's ice shove measurements here seeman keeping with
Speaker 2: the measurements I'm seeing in twenty twenty and ice shove
Speaker 2: on Lake Winnebago was, according to NBC twenty six out
Speaker 2: of Northeastern Wisconsin quote, a couple of hundred feet long
Speaker 2: and taller than the supper Club itself. What does that
Speaker 2: quote mean? I'm taking it out of context. The article
Speaker 2: had this footage of the ice shove piled up next
Speaker 2: to Jim and Linda's Lake Shore supper Club in the
Speaker 2: town of Pipe appears to be like a single floor building.
Speaker 2: But still that is a lot of ice. Like that's
Speaker 2: a huge wall of moving ice, or I mean it's
Speaker 2: no longer moving, but still it has moved up. It
Speaker 2: has advanced in a way that is concerning.
Speaker 3: The supper club is threatened they're gonna get ice in
Speaker 3: their hot dish.
Speaker 2: Oh man, wow.
Speaker 3: So I looked up a few pictures of this, and
Speaker 3: it is alarming because, yeah, you can see cases where
Speaker 3: I guess these are lakeside houses where the ice is
Speaker 3: just shoved right up against the house, like you're saying,
Speaker 3: happen to the supper club here, and in some cases
Speaker 3: shoved into the house and apparently causes damage, like you know,
Speaker 3: busts a wall or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so I you know, I guess it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing where you had observed it and you
Speaker 2: knew that it can kind of occur. Suddenly you might
Speaker 2: have that in your mind when you can trying to
Speaker 2: convince the children not to play too close to the ice. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: though it also seems like a rare it's not so
Speaker 2: regular in occurrence that it really would happen all of
Speaker 2: the time. And coming back to our point earlier, there
Speaker 2: are a number of other more common things that could
Speaker 2: be dangerous about the ice and the ice at the
Speaker 2: edge of the coast. Or of course, even when the
Speaker 2: ice has melted, like the water's edge can still be dangerous,
Speaker 2: especially to a young child.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I mean there's plenty of danger just from
Speaker 3: falling in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, another interesting ice related phenomena I wanted to
Speaker 2: talk about here. There's less to this, and this will
Speaker 2: be kind of quick, I guess, but I ran across
Speaker 2: this idea of ice blink. It's not so much a
Speaker 2: property of the ice itself, but rather an optical interaction.
Speaker 2: It's essentially a glare in the sky over an ice field.
Speaker 2: Though not to be confused with various other various actual
Speaker 2: forms of mirages, such as the fata morgana, which we've
Speaker 2: discussed in the show before. These are also found in
Speaker 2: the Arctic, and there's an entire chapter in Lopez's book
Speaker 2: Arctic Dreams where he talks about about this, about the
Speaker 2: northern lights and so forth. But basically, ice blink is
Speaker 2: just the bright white reflection in the clouds above an
Speaker 2: expanse of ice. So if you're at sea in the
Speaker 2: Arctic and you see ice blink in the distance and
Speaker 2: you know what you're looking at for and looking at,
Speaker 2: of course you can navigate by it, knowing that this
Speaker 2: means that there's likely a large expanse of ice in
Speaker 2: that direction. Likewise, the opposite is true with water sky.
Speaker 2: So if you're on a great expanse of ice and
Speaker 2: the overcast sky is bright with reflected light, you might
Speaker 2: see a dark patch of sky in the distance that
Speaker 2: indicates a body of open water beneath it. So in
Speaker 2: other words, it's you know, it's the presence of dark
Speaker 2: clouds over an area of open water in a region
Speaker 2: that is otherwise frozen. And this, you know, these are
Speaker 2: signs that indigenous peoples would have known about and used
Speaker 2: to navigate, and techniques that then would have been adopted
Speaker 2: by individuals exploring from other parts to the world. It
Speaker 2: reminds me of some of what we discussed in our
Speaker 2: episodes about Pacific navigation and how there are signs that
Speaker 2: the informed mind could look for in the sky that
Speaker 2: would indicate the presence of an island.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So listeners, if you haven't heard, we
Speaker 3: did a series a while back on yeah, techniques of
Speaker 3: navigation used by Pacific island peoples to make long sea
Speaker 3: voyages without modern instruments and stuff like that, and it's
Speaker 3: amazing how much information you can actually get from things
Speaker 3: like the stars, sea currents, birds and things like that
Speaker 3: that the untrained I would never understand to interpret as
Speaker 3: relevant information about where the position of an island was
Speaker 3: relative to you. But that was truly one of the
Speaker 3: most mind blowing series I think we've ever done, because
Speaker 3: it just opened my eyes to the fact that there
Speaker 3: is so much information in the world that can be
Speaker 3: exploited if you know what to look for, and to
Speaker 3: a person who doesn't know what to look for, it's
Speaker 3: completely invisible. You'd have no idea that it corresponded to
Speaker 3: any kind of navigationally relevant facts.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 3: And anyway, Yeah, this is another thing like that. I
Speaker 3: never would have thought of this, but this is very
Speaker 3: interesting navigating by the reflection of the surface color of
Speaker 3: a landscape over the horizon as it reflects on the
Speaker 3: clouds in the sky.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because to the untrained eye you would just think, oh,
Speaker 2: dark cloud in the distance. There's a white cloud in
Speaker 2: the distance, but yeah, to know what it means, we
Speaker 2: can give you vital information about where you're going.
Speaker 3: Now, speaking of the color of ice and of sea ice,
Speaker 3: this brings me to something I wanted to talk about today,
Speaker 3: which is the color of icebergs. I was thinking about
Speaker 3: how most icebergs, of most icebergs and sea ice and
Speaker 3: ice sheets you see are basically white in color. But
Speaker 3: occasionally I will see photos of icebergs that have streaks
Speaker 3: or whole surfaces that are other colors, maybe blue icebergs
Speaker 3: that look very beautiful and strange, and I wonder what
Speaker 3: makes the difference there, So I looked into this a
Speaker 3: little bit. Now, most icebergs are indeed white in color,
Speaker 3: but of course sometimes icebergs of other colors can be found,
Speaker 3: apparently especially coming off of Antarctica, and we can talk
Speaker 3: about reasons for that. But the white, relatively opaque surface
Speaker 3: of a common iceberg is caused by how ice accumulates,
Speaker 3: which is by adding layers of snow. In most cases,
Speaker 3: so icebergs typically begin as part of a glacier or
Speaker 3: a polar ice sheet, which eventually breaks off in pieces
Speaker 3: and floats away in the ocean. So it originally formed
Speaker 3: along with the rest of the glacier. And the way
Speaker 3: that forms is snow falls down from the sky, It
Speaker 3: piles up, it gets compressed, and if it doesn't melt seasonally,
Speaker 3: more snow falls on top of it and just keeps
Speaker 3: piling up and getting more and more compressed until it
Speaker 3: forms this solid chunk or sheet of ice. This process
Speaker 3: can become cumulative over many snowfalls, many seasons, many years,
Speaker 3: and eventually it forms this glacier, and then a piece
Speaker 3: of this glacier or ice sheet can break off and
Speaker 3: float away in the water. So what determines the difference
Speaker 3: in color, Well, when you see a white iceberg, what
Speaker 3: you're seeing there, apparently is the relatively uncompressed upper or
Speaker 3: outer layers of the snowpack that is forming the ice
Speaker 3: on top of it. That relatively uncompressed snow contains lots
Speaker 3: of little imperfections like air bubbles especially, and just lots
Speaker 3: of little reflective surfaces within the relatively low density outer layers.
Speaker 3: And these little imperfections and air bubbles and things tend
Speaker 3: to scatter light. They reflect all frequencies of light equally,
Speaker 3: And of course when you combine all colors of light,
Speaker 3: you get white light, so that light bounces off and
Speaker 3: it appears white to our eyes. But when you're making
Speaker 3: a glacier, as each layer of ice becomes more deeply
Speaker 3: buried in a glacier or iceberg, it gets pressed harder
Speaker 3: by the layers above, so new snowfalls the ice load
Speaker 3: above it becomes heavier, and the imperfections tend to get
Speaker 3: squeezed out, like air bubbles get compressed and removed. The
Speaker 3: ice crystals that were originally snowflakes get squeezed and they
Speaker 3: form larger crystals of dense ice. So this dens or
Speaker 3: more compressed ice does not reflect all frequencies of light equally. Instead,
Speaker 3: it starts to behave in a different way. It absorbs
Speaker 3: or some wavelengths, especially longer wavelengths toward the red end
Speaker 3: of the spectrum colors like red, orange, and yellow, whereas
Speaker 3: shorter wavelengths on the green, blue, indigo, violet into the
Speaker 3: spectrum are less likely to be absorbed and more likely
Speaker 3: to bounce back out. So if you see an iceberg
Speaker 3: that looks opaque white on the outside, it is probably
Speaker 3: covered with snow or uncompressed surface ice or ice that
Speaker 3: has been weathered and scratched up in some way. If
Speaker 3: you see an iceberg that looks a more cloudy blue,
Speaker 3: you're probably seeing the exposed, compressed layers of ice from
Speaker 3: an older glacier or from deep inside the glacier formation.
Speaker 3: And sometimes icebergs also look blue and a bit more
Speaker 3: translucenter even transparent when they somehow capsize in the water,
Speaker 3: bringing up the smoother blue portion that was once under
Speaker 3: the waterline. And there are also some other formation methods
Speaker 3: for blue spectrum and translucent bergs, and frankly, with these
Speaker 3: they look not only beautiful but downright shocking.
Speaker 2: Rob.
Speaker 3: I've attached a couple of examples for you to look
Speaker 3: at here, and it's almost beyond words.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this looks like a potential fragment of an amazing
Speaker 2: airbrush mural on the side of a van from the
Speaker 2: late seventies early eighties that is somehow ended up in
Speaker 2: the Arctic. It's like it has that much. It's like
Speaker 2: marbled looking as well, like it's just amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like held in the hand of an
Speaker 3: airbrush wizard. I think it's like, I don't know, breathing
Speaker 3: smoke on it or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, to see ice really looking blue, you don't actually
Speaker 3: have to look for an iceberg floating in the water
Speaker 3: that has flipped over. Somehow. You can see this, for example,
Speaker 3: in cracks and crevasses, in ice sheets and glaciers. I
Speaker 3: dug up some pictures for you to look at here, rob,
Speaker 3: But if you look this up at home, you can
Speaker 3: see it for yourself. Look up like glacier crevass. Often
Speaker 3: the way it will appear is that the top layer
Speaker 3: is opaque white like we're used to seeing. You know,
Speaker 3: where the snow has been piled on. But if you're
Speaker 3: able to look down into the crack, you will see
Speaker 3: progressively bluer and bluer shades, Like the light coming out
Speaker 3: is a deeper blue the deeper you go down. And
Speaker 3: again this is a result of that ice being more compressed.
Speaker 2: And the blue can look just quite dark to the
Speaker 2: untrained eye. You would almost think artificially blue. Yeah, like,
Speaker 2: what happened to this glacier? What kind of toilet water
Speaker 2: was transformed into this glacier?
Speaker 3: No. I was reading about this in an article for
Speaker 3: Scientific American by Catherine Wright called icebergs can be green, black,
Speaker 3: striped or even rainbow. And one of the things this
Speaker 3: article mentions is its sites an expert named DANIELA. Janssen
Speaker 3: who is a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegner Institute for
Speaker 3: Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and this researcher talks
Speaker 3: about a different iceberg formation process, which is the direct
Speaker 3: freezing of sea water leading to the creation of marine ice. So,
Speaker 3: according to Jansen, this kind of ice can build up
Speaker 3: underneath ice shelves, and an ice shelf is where part
Speaker 3: of a land based glacier extends past dry land and
Speaker 3: juts out over the sea, so it's like a shelf
Speaker 3: over the water. And under the ice shelves of Antarctica,
Speaker 3: actual frozen seawater can agglomerate into formations that can eventually
Speaker 3: become icebergs, Whereas the snow that falls layer by layer
Speaker 3: and accumulates into a glacier on land is mostly pure water.
Speaker 3: Ice that accumulates by the freezing of sea water, which
Speaker 3: is more rare, comes with a lot of stuff in it.
Speaker 3: So because it's seawater, right, so it can have mineral
Speaker 3: dust and just you know, grains of rocks and various
Speaker 3: kinds of minerals. That can bring different colors to a
Speaker 3: resulting iceberg that comes from the freezing of the seawater.
Speaker 3: Maybe it has a lot of iron particles in it,
Speaker 3: or maybe it has black looking you know, volcanic lava minerals.
Speaker 3: It can also have a lot of dead stuff in it,
Speaker 3: dead or living organic matter. And apparently marine ice that
Speaker 3: forms this way out of seawater with a lot of
Speaker 3: dead cells from organic matter can tend to be yellow
Speaker 3: or green in color. And so if you've ever seeing
Speaker 3: yellow or green icebergs, especially coming from around Antarctica, because
Speaker 3: these types of marine ice iceberg, they tend to form
Speaker 3: only in very cold conditions because again they have to
Speaker 3: be formed out of seawater. Seawater, having greater salt content,
Speaker 3: is harder to freeze than fresh water. So basically all
Speaker 3: of this, like multicolored ice made out of seawater, only
Speaker 3: forms around Antarctica. Anything from the Arctic North will typically
Speaker 3: be white or blue. This marine ice that forms around
Speaker 3: Antarctica sometimes has these like gross amazing you know, like
Speaker 3: green jade or yellow death colors, and a lot of
Speaker 3: this tends to be organic contaminants. Meanwhile, marine ice that
Speaker 3: forms underneath these ice shelves, but doesn't have much in
Speaker 3: the way of contaminants, tends to be very translucent or
Speaker 3: even almost transparent, appearing you can see deep into it.
Speaker 3: So this is where you get these these strange looking
Speaker 3: bergs that are almost as clear as glass and a
Speaker 3: very dark color, almost a deep blue or even a black.
Speaker 3: You can also get striped icebergs, and this happens when
Speaker 3: you have an ice shelf hanging out over the ocean
Speaker 3: and cracks form along the submerged portion, and these areas
Speaker 3: can flood with seawater, forming stripes of different colors and
Speaker 3: opacity than the surrounding ice. So maybe you've got some
Speaker 3: ice that's, you know, the regular sort of blue ice,
Speaker 3: and then it fills in with some marine ice from
Speaker 3: seawater that had a bunch of dead organic matter in it,
Speaker 3: so it might have like stripes of yellow or stripes
Speaker 3: of green. But I want to move on to another
Speaker 3: iceberg related topic, which is icebergs beyond Earth. So you
Speaker 3: might kind of wonder, well, how could that even be possible,
Speaker 3: because we know that Earth is the only planet in
Speaker 3: the Solar System with liquid water oceans on the surface.
Speaker 3: Other planets may have had them long ago in the past,
Speaker 3: but not today. We do know that there are some
Speaker 3: some other objects, some moons in the Solar System that
Speaker 3: have liquid oceans underneath the surface, like Jupiter's moon Europa.
Speaker 3: But there is one other object in the Solar System
Speaker 3: that does have liquid seas in lakes and rivers on
Speaker 3: its surface, though they are not made out of water.
Speaker 3: That space object is Saturn's moon Titan, which is Saturn's
Speaker 3: largest moon, the second largest moon in the whole Solar
Speaker 3: System after Jupiter's Ganymede, and the only moon in the
Speaker 3: Solar System with a dense atmosphere which is made mostly
Speaker 3: of nitrogen and is in fact extremely thick. The atmospheric
Speaker 3: pressure on the surface of Titan is about fifty or
Speaker 3: sixty percent greater than the pressure at sea level on Earth.
Speaker 3: So one comparison I've come across is that just standing
Speaker 3: in the air on the surface of Titan would feel
Speaker 3: kind of like it would be a level of pressure
Speaker 3: similar to being fifteen meters or fifty feet underwater on Earth.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that's thick. Titan is also extremely cold, with
Speaker 3: an average surface temperature of one hundred and eighty three
Speaker 3: of a negative one hundred and eighty three degrees celsius
Speaker 3: or negative two hundred and ninety seven degrees fahrenheit. That's
Speaker 3: really cold. Of course, that is too cold to support
Speaker 3: liquid water on the surface. It is not going to
Speaker 3: have water oceans. But nevertheless, Titan does have large stable
Speaker 3: systems of rivers, lakes, and seas made out of not water,
Speaker 3: but liquid hydrocarbons, especially liquid methane, ethane, and some liquid nitrogen.
Speaker 3: So methane is a hydrocarbon that we know here on
Speaker 3: Earth as well chemical formula H four. On Earth, it's
Speaker 3: pretty much always in the form of a gas. Ethane.
Speaker 3: Another hydrocarbon is C two H six, and together methane
Speaker 3: and ethane contribute to a kind of atmospheric chemical cycle
Speaker 3: on Titan that has some resemblances to but also some
Speaker 3: differences from the water cycle on Earth. So, like, methane
Speaker 3: is released apparently from deep inside the interior of Titan,
Speaker 3: and then it forms a sort of weather system. It
Speaker 3: gets broken down by sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and
Speaker 3: there are there is some kind of methane or methane
Speaker 3: downstream product weather system where you know, these these organic
Speaker 3: molecules fall down from above, so you get like rains
Speaker 3: and snows that have these hydrocarbon features. So one of
Speaker 3: the consequences of this wet hydrocarbon environment is a surface
Speaker 3: with snaking rivers and massive lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, especially
Speaker 3: clustered around the Moon's polar regions. So the three largest
Speaker 3: of these hydrocarbon seas in order of size are Kraken Mare,
Speaker 3: Lygea Mare, and Punga Mare, which are all situated around
Speaker 3: the Moon's north pole. Mythology notes, by the way, I
Speaker 3: think we know the kraken, but the Punga is the
Speaker 3: name of a being in Maori mythology who is a
Speaker 3: sun of the sea deity Tangaroa, but also the fog
Speaker 3: there are of all creatures considered strange and ugly, including
Speaker 3: lizards and sharks. Ligia was the name was a name
Speaker 3: that appeared in Greek mythology in multiple contexts, but always
Speaker 3: associated with minor seed deities like the Nereids or the Sirens,
Speaker 3: and also in a creepy Edgar Allan Poe short story
Speaker 3: where I think the deal is Ligia was the narrator's wife,
Speaker 3: and she died, and then he marries another woman, and
Speaker 3: then she dies, but then resurrects from the dead as
Speaker 3: his first wife, Ligia.
Speaker 2: This would be the tomb of Ligia, right.
Speaker 3: I think so, And that's the one that has the
Speaker 3: poem the Conqueror Worm.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And there was a Vincent Price adaptation of
Speaker 2: this one to some time.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So anyway, you've got these, Maria, These these seas
Speaker 3: or lakes, I don't know what the you know, whether
Speaker 3: you want to call them sees or lakes. The biggest one,
Speaker 3: I think has been compared roughly to the size of
Speaker 3: the Caspian Sea on Earth. I think Lygia Marea seen
Speaker 3: compared roughly to the size of Lake superior A. But whatever,
Speaker 3: how we classify them. These bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on
Speaker 3: Titan were documented extensively through radar imaging carried out by
Speaker 3: the Cassini Mission orbiter over a period of many years
Speaker 3: in the in the two thousands and twenty tens. So
Speaker 3: I wanted to zoom in on some of these different
Speaker 3: radar images of Legmre, the second largest sea on Titan,
Speaker 3: and these photos were taken at intervals between two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven and twenty fifteen. Rob, I've got these for
Speaker 3: you to look at here. So what we see appears
Speaker 3: to be a sort of flower shaped peninsula of land
Speaker 3: jetting out into the sea and off of one of
Speaker 3: the petals of this flower of land, there is a mystery.
Speaker 3: In the image from two thousand and seven, the land
Speaker 3: terminates and there's just nothing but dark lake beyond it. Then,
Speaker 3: in an image from twenty thirteen, suddenly there is what
Speaker 3: appears to be an island off the same coastal feature.
Speaker 3: Then in another image from twenty fourteen, the island seems
Speaker 3: to have faded into just a wisp of discoloration, something
Speaker 3: that looks like it could be you know, I'm using
Speaker 3: too much of an Earth analogy here, but it looks
Speaker 3: like it could be like an atoll, or like a
Speaker 3: bank of shallows. And then by twenty fifteen, the island
Speaker 3: has vanished completely and only the dark liquid remains once more.
Speaker 3: What the heck or how is the topography of Titan
Speaker 3: changing like that? Are islands appearing and disappearing on this
Speaker 3: alien sea? So these types of anomalies have been referred
Speaker 3: to in the press as the magic islands of Titan,
Speaker 3: since they seem to appear and disappear when we're not looking,
Speaker 3: and it's still not known for sure what they are,
Speaker 3: but there are some ideas, some proposals. You would need
Speaker 3: something that would be present long enough to have a
Speaker 3: reasonable chance of being caught in images taken by the orbiter,
Speaker 3: but also something that would disappear completely within a couple
Speaker 3: of years. So there have been various suggestions, including floating
Speaker 3: hydrocarbon solids like particles that have fallen from the atmosphere,
Speaker 3: maybe a sort of carbon based dust floating on the lake,
Speaker 3: or perhaps massive upwellings of nitrogen gas bubbles appearing as
Speaker 3: bright spots on the radar image. But just recently in
Speaker 3: January twenty twenty four, a group of researchers suggested another possibility,
Speaker 3: which is hydrocarbon icebergs, basically porous honeycomb like frozen masses
Speaker 3: of hydrocarbons. So the paper in question here is by
Speaker 3: Zinting Uau, Julia Garver, Xijiang, and Patricia mcgugen. It's called
Speaker 3: the Fate of Simple Organics on Titan's Surface, a theoretical
Speaker 3: perspective published in Geophysical Research Letters. So the authors here
Speaker 3: are saying, in the atmosphere of Titan, you've got these
Speaker 3: simple compounds like methane that get broken down, maybe by
Speaker 3: exposure to sunlight, and they recombine and end up transformed
Speaker 3: into bigger, more complex organic molecules. And many of these
Speaker 3: carbon based compounds freeze solid and fall to the surface.
Speaker 3: Now what happens when these hydrocarbon ices fall on the
Speaker 3: surface of Titan's lakes. It seems that most of them
Speaker 3: probably sink to the bottom, becoming new layers of lake
Speaker 3: bed sediment. Because remember it's peculiar to water that frozen
Speaker 3: water floats on the surface of liquid water. Most frozen
Speaker 3: solids increase in density and would be likely to sink
Speaker 3: in liquid, but not all frozen hydrocarbons would sink. The
Speaker 3: author's right quote, imagine a sponge full of holes. If
Speaker 3: the solids are like this, with twenty five percent to
Speaker 3: sixty percent of their volume being empty space, they can float.
Speaker 3: Some solids, like hydrogen cyanide ice can also float due
Speaker 3: to surface tension effects. And I was reading in a
Speaker 3: press release the lead author ut San Antonio planetary scientist
Speaker 3: Zinting Yu has compared these icebergs to the way that
Speaker 3: porous volcanic pummice can float on the surface of oceans
Speaker 3: on Earth before eventually becoming saturated and sinking. So in
Speaker 3: this paper, the authors created a model of how various
Speaker 3: materials would behave on the lake surface, and they concluded
Speaker 3: that it wouldn't work unless conditions were just right. But
Speaker 3: if they were right, it would work. You could have
Speaker 3: these floating icebergs of hydrocarbons. So to read from the
Speaker 3: press release summary, quote used modeling suggested individual clumps are
Speaker 3: likely too small to float by themselves, but if enough
Speaker 3: clumps mass together near the shore, large pieces could break
Speaker 3: off and float away, similar to how glaciers calve on
Speaker 3: Earth calving they're referring to, yeah, parts of a glacier
Speaker 3: breaking off and falling into the water. The press release
Speaker 3: continues with a combination of a bigger size and the
Speaker 3: right porosity, these organic glaciers could explain the magic island phenomenon.
Speaker 3: So the issue is not settled. This is yet another
Speaker 3: proposal for what it could be to explain these these
Speaker 3: magic islands in the radar images. But I kind of
Speaker 3: hope this explanation has proven right because I love the
Speaker 3: idea of icebergs on titan Maybe maybe that would like
Speaker 3: warn us away from the humorus of trying to launch
Speaker 3: a Titanic on the Lakes of Titan. I don't know,
Speaker 3: But then again, I guess if they're very porous and
Speaker 3: honeycomb like, maybe they wouldn't represent much of a threat
Speaker 3: to bodes. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Well, this is this is fascinating. Yeah, I had not
Speaker 2: thought about you know, obviously the topic of ice and
Speaker 2: oceans and water on other worlds and moons within our
Speaker 2: Solar system has coming before, but I had not looked
Speaker 2: at this idea of giant honeycomb glaciers. Potentially this is
Speaker 2: This is fascinating. But to be clear, not an alien spaceship.
Speaker 3: No reason to think so. I think we would. We
Speaker 3: would exhaust the I don't know, planetary science explanations before
Speaker 3: turning to alien technology.
Speaker 2: It's probably telling that the press latched onto the term
Speaker 2: Magic Islands and yet like it kind of maybe even
Speaker 2: too much of a stretch to say, is this is
Speaker 2: this an alien space ship?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: At best Magic Island.
Speaker 3: Well, I have no inclination to think it's a spaceship,
Speaker 3: but I still do find that just the idea of
Speaker 3: surface features appearing and disappearing on the Lakes of Titan
Speaker 3: very very spooky and fascinating.
Speaker 2: Absolutely all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close
Speaker 2: out this episode. Obviously, there's there's so much more we're
Speaker 2: regarding ice we could cover. I don't. We haven't decided yet.
Speaker 2: If we're doing a third ice episode, we may go
Speaker 2: on to some other topic, but potentially we could come
Speaker 2: back to ice in the future if that's the case,
Speaker 2: because just in Lopez's book, I mean, he has whole
Speaker 2: stretches where he's talking about like different types of ice
Speaker 2: and the behavior of ice, and of course indigenous beliefs
Speaker 2: and traditions concerning ice. There's a lot we could cover.
Speaker 2: And likewise, we know a lot of you out there.
Speaker 2: You have direct experience with ice in ways that we don't.
Speaker 2: You may have takes on some of the things we've
Speaker 2: discussed here, observations, traditions, et cetera, and we would love
Speaker 2: to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to
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