When glaciers form, they do so in layers, with clear blue ice sandwiched between sediment and air-bubble-filled white ice. Because each of these layers absorbs sunlight differently, they don’t melt Keep reading
Tag: melting
Frozen Wavelets
Photographer Eric Gross captured these surreal alpine landscapes in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Although the lake’s surface appears to have frozen waves, the prevailing theory is that these mounds and divots Keep reading
Ice Patterns
Periods of freezing and thawing can leave complicated patterns in ice, as seen in this aerial photo of Binnewater Lake in New York. Ice rarely forms evenly on large bodies Keep reading
Ice Labyrinths
Pattern formation is extremely common in nature, from the dendritic growth of trees and snowflakes to the stripes of a tiger. A new paper describes how a thin layer of Keep reading
Melting
File this one under “Oddly Satisfying” – this timelapse video shows the process of melting a jawbreaker candy using a blowtorch. Over a minute and a half, each colorful layer of Keep reading
Enormous Ice Disk
We’ve seen spinning ice disks before, but this month Westbrook, Maine has developed the largest one I’ve ever seen. A research paper from 2016 indicates that this seemingly alien formation spins Keep reading
Dissolving Candy
In nature, solid surfaces often evolve over time in conjunction with the flows around them. This is how stalactites, canyons, and hoodoos all form and change over time. Here researchers Keep reading
Snowmelt
Much of the rain that falls on Earth began as snow high in the atmosphere. As it falls through warmer layers of air, the snowflakes melt and form water droplets. Keep reading
Scallops and Erosion
Although we often think of solids as immovable in the face of flow, the motion of air and water sculpts many parts of our world. One common pattern, seen both Keep reading
Icebergs and Caramel
What do icebergs and caramel have in common? Both have similar scalloped erosion patterns as they dissolve. When caramel dissolves in water, the denser caramel sinks in the buoyant water. Keep reading