Web Sites of Relevance to Ice,
its structure and uses

Ice occurs in many places, it can be beautiful but is also dangerous. There are many links to related web sites here. The beginning of this page is for people who want to learn a little about ice and look at some pictures.

This page is still under construction. 19 Jan 2000
More technical information for research workers is at the end.

Please send comments and further news items about ice to the BCA Webmaster.

• Ice in Space
• Ice on the Earth
• Ice and Climate, glaciers
• Icebergs and the wreck of the Titanic

Ice in Space

• on the moon
  The Lunar Prospector space craft contains an experiment which can detect the hydrogen atoms in water. While orbiting the moon earlier this year, it found evidence that ice exists over both lunar polar-regions. It is estimated that there are several hundred billion kilograms of ice in total. Look for details at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice-moon.html
• in comets
  The core of comets consists of a mixture of water ice, frozen carbon dioxide, solid ammonia, organic material and rock. Make your own coment with this recipe. When comets pass near the sun they heat up, and some of the CO2 sublimes, leading to the tails that can sometimes be seen. Here are images of ice on comets.
  
  Research workers at RAL are working on the ROSETTA project which plans to land on a comet and try to analyse it.
• on planets and their satellites
  Triton, Neptune's largest moon, possesses both ice and large active geysers of water. Look at http://www.transatlantech.com/TPS/gsp-stars-pluto.htm" for images related to Neptune.
  Charon, the largest moon of Pluto, is also covered with ice. No one knows what structure the ice possesses in these cases. Look at for images related to Pluto.

Ice on the Earth

• Ice is Fun
  Ice and snow are beautiful to observe, great to play in and fun for mountaineers. Look at http://www.web.co.za/everest/profile.htm
  
• Ice is beautiful
  There are some beautiful images of snow crystals at the Snow Crystals site mentioned in the front of Science for 14 Jan 2000.
• Ice used in transport
  In colder parts of the world, skiing, skating and sledging, were essential for transport. Nowadays they are also sport and leisure activities. Look here for Olympic skiing or here for Guess what
• Ice sculptures
  Ice sculpture is a popular but difficult art form, practised especially in Japan and Canada. Some people also try to colour ice, but this is difficult as ice normally expels solvents, including salt, as it freezes. In nature, coloured snow is caused when fungi get incorporated into it. Look at this site and this one
• Ice for building
  You all know that Eskimos can make igloos, houses out of blocks of snow. Did you know that every year in the far, far north, by a snow covered forest a winter palace is built? One of the first was built for a Russian empress in 1740. Now in Sweden, 200 kilometres North of the Artic Circle an ice hotel is built every year. Look at their web site for details of room rates and how to get there. Building with ice is rather different from building with stone, you can find tips on the art of ice building in the book 'Ice Palaces, by Fred Anderes and Ann Agranoff published in 1983 by Abbeville Press
•  Ice and Climate
  • Snow
    Ice is found in many forms on earth. Snow flakes are formed when the air is cold and water vapour freezes around a small speck of ice or dust. When undamaged they normally have hexagonal shapes, reproducing the underlying atomic symmetry. Look here to find out more about snow. Some pictures of snow flakes can be found at http://metsun4.geophys.hokudau.ac.jp:20080/crystal/gallery.htm
  • Glaciers
    Glaciers are fed each year by snow falling in high mountainous regions. The glacier slowly moves down the valley, carrying this snow with it, a movement made possible by deviations from perfect atomic order called dislocations. The glacier scours the valley as it moves and the dirt and rock so loosened become incorporated into it. If the weather is cold over several seasons the glacier grows in length, if it is warm the glacier melts more than is usual and gets shorter. Look at this picture gallery
  • Crystal Sound in the Antarctic has many places named after people who worked on the structure of ice.
  • Finding the age of the ice
    Ice Cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of ice sheets or glaciers. They can be several thousand metres long in total, although they are cut section by section. Since snow falls each year, and contains trapped gases, chemicals and dust, chemical analysis of the core yields information on climate and man's effect on the environment. Information going back half a million years has been obtained.
  • Icebergs float
    Icebergs float, by Archimedes' principle, because the density of ice is less than that of water. They are found in many of the colder regions of the world, where they exist for some time both because of the cold surroundings (in fact sea water can often be colder than the normal melting point of the pure ice in icebergs) and because it takes a lot of heat energy to break the hydrogen bonds in ice. http://www.rdc.uscg.mil/iippages/home.html
  • Where do  icebergs come from?
    Icebergs can be 'calved' from ice shelves if an ice shelf warms up and deep ice cracking occurs. Ice cracks are usual in summer in polar regions, but the calving of the glacier from the Larsen ice shelf in 1995 was unusual, and accompanied other forms of disintegration of the shelf. It was due to recent warming trends in the area. Look here and here for more pictures
  • Icebergs can be dangerous
    It was an iceberg which sank the Titanic on its maiden voyage. You can find links to many sites by looking at the Smithsonian site.
    If you wonder why the Titanic was made of such flimsy materials try looking at the site with the properties of the metals from which the Titanic was constructed.

Technical section for research into the structure of ice

This page is still under construction, I plan to add the phase diagram and images of the various structues.

An introduction to the study of the crystal structure of ice can be found in the ILL Annual Report for 1997, where the discovery of a new form of ice is reported.

Web sites

• Database of research papers
• American Government Laboratory with information on snow and ice around the world.
• University Laboratory

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