There's a lot more to frozen water than chilled drinks (though they have a surprisingly complicated history as well!) Check out how...
- The First Ice Palace Was Built to Punish a Prince
- Ice Has a Long (and at Times, Dark) History With Medicine
- Ice May Be the Key to Low-Cost Electric Vehicles
- There's Naturally Occurring Colored Snow
- Snowflakes Can Be Massive and Snowstorms Can Be Incredibly Deadly
- America's Early Ice Industry Acted Like Drug Pushers
- Jean Hilliard Survived Being "Frozen Alive"
- Ötzi the Iceman Was Murdered in the Copper-Age and Became an Ice Mummy
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| The Harbin Ice and Snow Festival demonstrates what can be done with frozen water! (Erica Li) |
The First Ice Palace Was Built to Punish a PrinceIce has been used in architecture and decoration for thousands of years. The early Inuit are thought to have been building igloos around 4,000 years ago, while frozen lanterns (created by freezing water in a bucket, removing it and chiseling a hollow for a candle) were made in 17th century China.
Empress Anna Ivanovna of Russia is thought to have commissioned the first "Ice Palace" around 1739. Imitations soon sprang up, and apparently they were pretty lucrative. One was estimated to have recouped the cost of construction within a mere six days, with visitors particularly impressed when the structure was lit up with electric lights.
Though it may have been a spectacle, the original ice palace was an instrument of punishment. The empress forced disgraced prince-turned-jester Mikhail Golitsyn to marry a servant named Avdotia Buzheninova and spend the night in the icy building. Golitsyn had apparently offended the empress by previously marrying a catholic!
Of course, the idea of sleeping in a palace of carved ice does have a certain fairy-tale charm. Venues in Sweden and Norway offer a variety of frozen hotels for the modern vacationer with chilly tastes!
Ice Has a Long (and at Times, Dark) History With Medicine
Ice has had a fairly long history in medicine - but also a dark one. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates recommended using snow or ice to slow bleeding. Later, Baron de Larrey (a surgeon in Napoleon's invasion of Russia) made a habit of packing limbs with ice prior to amputations. This numbed the limb so that it could be removed without pain.In the Victorian era "surprise" baths of iced water were used as a treatment for the mentally ill, in an attempt to shock the patient back to normalcy... though in reality, this treatment did more to subdue a patient than help them. In fact, sudden immersion in icy water can be quite lethal - it can kill you in less than a minute.
In modern times, therapeutic hypothermia can be used to help a patient avoid brain damage during cardiac arrest. The mechanism for how this works isn't entirely known, but it's thought that the cold reduces the metabolic rate of the brain - meaning that braincells use up their energy reserves a bit more slowly!
On the flip side of the coin, some people hope that ice will let them "survive" death. The controversial science of cryonics seeks to freeze the recently dead, preserving their bodies in the hope of resuscitating them with medicine that hasn't yet been invented!
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| Electric vehicles can be good for the environment... unless they explode. (Anastasiya Badun) |
Ice May Be the Key to Low-Cost Electric VehiclesElectric vehicles have been suggested as a potentially environmentally-friendly alternative to combustion engines - after all, no burning fuel means no exhaust fumes. Here's the snag - the these vehicles can become explosive.
The problem is the lithium-ion batteries - if they get damaged (or are defective) they can burst into flames or even explode. This means that they need to be sealed in bomb-proof containers for transport - a safe box for a Tesla battery costs around €10,000 with a further €10,000 for UN accreditation.
Researchers have found that flash-freezing the batteries and transporting them while frozen can prevent them from entering thermal runaway - the chain reaction that causes the batteries to explode. Researchers were even able to drive nails into the batteries without a blast... and the performance of undamaged batteries was unaffected after they were thawed back out!
There's Naturally Occurring Colored Snow
Though they get depicted as being pure white, snowflakes are actually translucent - uncontaminated snow simply seems this way thanks to reflected light. Things change when the snow isn't pure - such as rusty orange snowfalls tinted by wind-blown Saharan sand!Much more dramatic is watermelon snow (sometimes called glacier blood) where the drifts acquire a pink colour and vaguely sweet taste. The culprit is algal blooms such as Chlamydomonas nivalis living in the snow - this green algae contains a red pigment and is cryophilic, meaning that it thrives in freezing water.
Despite the resemblance, one should refrain from consuming them like an icy treat - they may contain sand, dirt or microbial toxins!
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| Blizzards can get much more severe than this... (Dillon Wanner) |
Snowflakes Can Be Massive and Snowstorms Can Be Incredibly DeadlySnowstorms can dispense a massive amount of frozen water. Mount Shasta in the USA experienced an incredible 4.8m snowfall during a continuous snowstorm that raged for nearly a week the in February of 1959. Perhaps the deadliest flurry of blizzards occurred in 1972 Iran, where an estimated 4,000 (some papers put the figure as high as 6,000) people died beneath nearly 8m of snow.
On a lighter note, the Guinness Book of Records suggests a 38cm wide and 20cm thick snowflake fell in January 1887 based on reports from Fort Keogh in Montana, USA. Ranch owner Matt Coleman claimed that they were "larger than milk pans" in an article with the Monthly Weather Review Magazine. There doesn't seem to be any photographic evidence to back up that claim though!
America's Early Ice Industry Acted Like Drug Pushers
One thing that often surprises visitors to the USA is the sheer amount of ice put in drinks. This trend dates back to the middle of the 18th century, when America discovered a love for frozen water - even transporting it all the way from New England to the Caribbean.Early attempts to move ice were not wildly successful. Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor of Boston was one of the earliest entrepreneurs in the field, but the lion's share of his first few ventures melted before reaching their intended market. Refinements in harvesting techniques (like an ice harvesting plough and insulating the ice with sawdust) made the process viable, and Tudor incredibly wealthy.
Not content to supply ice for medical and food storage, Tudor made use of a trick later adopted by drug dealers - he offered free samples of ice to get people hooked on chilled drinks. In the heat of an American summer, few people wanted to go back to warm cocktails after experiencing an iced one. Demand reached the point where rumors of an "ice famine" were enough to prompt harvesters to sail to the Arctic and chop ice straight from icebergs!
Jean Hilliard Survived Being "Frozen Alive"
Did you know that there have been rare cases in which people have survived being partially frozen? Jean Hilliard fell unconscious as she sought help on foot, having slid her borrowed car into a ditch one sub-zero night. By the time a friend found and got her to a hospital, her core temperature had fallen to 27°C (10°C below that of a healthy human) and medics couldn't even get a needle through her skin.There's a saying in the medical community that no one is dead until they're warm and dead, so staff fitted the frozen girl with heating pads and waited for the inevitable... only for her to make a complete recovery in a matter of hours!
Though less extreme, another consequence of cold exposure can be frozen corneas. There are examples of this happening in sub-zero marathon runners, with one individual displaying a cloudy and irritated eye that felt as though a foreign body was lodged inside it. Similar things can happen to parachutists when their eye protection fails.
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| The Ötztal Alps could hold many secrets... (Aron Marinelli) |
Ötzi the Iceman Was Murdered in the Copper-Age and Became an Ice Mummy
If a creature dies in an icy environment, it may become a freeze-dried ice mummy. That's what happened to Ötzi the Iceman, a copper-age human found by hikers in Ötztal Alps.
Ötzi and his equipment had endured the intervening 5,300 years fairly well, which allowed researchers to conduct a detailed analysis of his remains. They found him to be a 45-46 year-old man of an athletic build, with signs of healed broken bones, whipworm, Lyme disease and fleas. His last meal had included grains, ibex and venison, while his sooty lungs revealed that he spent a lot of time near open fires. Ötzi also carried a selection of survival equipment, including a valuable copper axe.
A rather darker finding was that Ötzi seems to have been murdered - an arrow strike to the back punched into his left shoulder and severed his subclavian artery. He was in such good condition that researchers were able to find fibrin around the embedded arrowhead - this protein helps clot and knit wounds, but is replaced quite quickly during the healing process. The presence of fibrin suggests that Ötzi bled to death within around half an hour of being shot - though his corpse also bore a severe headwound.
Frozen in time by the cold, Ötzi was moved to South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. Now he waits out the eons in a climate-controlled chamber that mimics his glacial resting place.
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