Strange Ice, Part 2

And we looked at a historical anecdote of Charles Darwin trekking across the Andes and coming across a field of these things, one that had a horse frozen inside it. But we also looked at ice formations such as ball ice, candle ice, rotten ice, and a lot of other creepy, interesting, physically counterintuitive ways that ice can form or decompose. And so we're coming back today to talk some more about strange ice.

very fascinating and haunting folk traditions concerning the ice. All right, what have you got, rob, So in the last episode we discussed mostly in passing the dangers of ice, specifically coastal sea ice and any sort of icy environment that humans will attempt to traverse or in any way exploit for hunting, fishing, recreation, scientific purposes. Specifically thinking about rotten ice, you know the idea that it's just not safe to

venture upon. And I imagine we have plenty of listeners out there who grew up in places with icy environments who can attest to the dangers of ice that I mean, there are just so many ways that it can potentially be dangerous. There's, of course, you know the fact that ice can be slippery, you can fall, and if you fall on ice, it is hard, and you know that can hurt you as well. Then you get into areas

where ice may give way. It may plunge us into freezing water, It may plunge us into hollow areas where the water is drained out, and so forth. There are so many ways that ice can pose a danger. Ice can also just be physically heavy as well.

through it and play in it as a child. And so yeah, that's I guess that's one of the things that we'll be getting into here, is like ice creates unique environments that, especially to a child, can be as intriguing as they are potentially hazardous.

these on the podcast a few years back. This would be Jenny Green Teeth, a river hag of English folklore widely understood as a kind of nursery boogie to keep children away from the water's edge bogie rather not boogie.

then filled in with water. And sometimes this water would have coverings of like algae or plant matter or something on top of it that would just make it look very green, make it look like it was just you know, a continuation of the grass almost.

for young children. The Japanese Kappa is one that we've also discussed in the past that sometimes takes on these connotations. And then of course this is another thing we're discussed in the show before. There's, of course, the nineteen seventy three British public information film Lonely Water, also known as the Spirit of Dark and Only Water, featuring the voice

of Donald Pleasance. This very much carries on the tradition here, and it's often discussed as something that traumatized an entire generation of British children.

I remember reading about some of the works of Francisco Goya in which he was criticizing this and taught and like tying in this whole idea that like, by having parents that invoke supernatural threats to keep children in line, they're not only potentially protecting their child from these threats, but they're also instilling supernatural belief at an early age that then, you know, matures and becomes these other modes of supernatural belief that to some may be seen as

more harmful in their adulthood.

And of course you know a lot has been written and continues to be written and said about this. So anyway, given all of this, she comes no surprise that there are traditions that involve creating supernatural entities or monstrous entities that are associated with the dangers of ice and keeping children away from the ice. So I want to turn to a couple of these from Native American First Nations traditions.

The first of these is the Abo damkin. This I was reading about this in the Dictionary of Native American Mythology by Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan. This is apparently an entity in the traditions of the Malaset and passima Quadi people in what is now the Canadian province of New Brunswick and the US state of Maine. The authors here describe it as a boogie monster with

long hair and huge teeth. Quote, fear of him keeps small children from straying on thin newly from was an ice in the winter and unguarded beaches in the summer.

sea monster. So, yeah, this would be something that dwells within the water. Now, another one that I was reading about this one. There's also a number of you may be familiar with. Is the Qualipeluit. This is an entity in the traditions of the Inuit, and there's an excellent ride up about it on the Kikwitani Inuit Association's Inuit Myths and Legends website Inuit Myths dot Com, which features some just haunting artwork and also text that is available

in both English and Inuit. Joe I included one of these images from the website here that is just absolutely terrifying.

a couple of additional illustrations on the website. Whether this pouch is in their clothing or if this is a pouch in their body. Here's a haunting excerpt from the Inuitmiths dot com website. Quote usually the Qualiteluit jump out of the water and grab children with about any warning. Sometimes, however,

you can hear them knocking under the ice. Some elders have said that if the ocean begins to become wavy in an area, or steam begins to rise from the ocean, aqulllipi lutt might be hiding underneath the water.

I highly recommend inuitmths dot com. The website features profiles and a handful of other mythological beam and creatures, including the two Knit who I mentioned in a recent Monster Fact episode. Wow, all right, so I mentioned the ice making sounds. So I want to move on now to the topic of what is known as ice shove. Now, this is more of a clear example of weird ice, or rather ice behaving in a way that many myths

might think of as weird. Though for a number of you out there, ice shove is just a reality, potential reality of the winter months. I was reading about this in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and he mentions there's a whole passage where he's talking about like long stillness broken by sudden movement as sort of a hallmark of Arctic landscapes, and he ties this also into just like a sense of patience that is also that he observed as being

present in native populations and indigenous peoples. But he cites an example of this ice shove concerning the breaking of both river ice and sea ice, and for river ice, Lowez describes it as follows, quote pistol reports of cracking on the river, and then the sound of breaking branches and the whining pop of a fallen tree is the

careening blocks of ice gouge the river banks. And he describes the sea ice variation as follows quote, Suddenly, in the middle of winter, and without warning, a huge piece of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive, and he cites the inopiat word ivo. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. My apologies for any mispronunciations on these terms. And it is also known as ice shove. I've also seen it referred to as ice tsunamis, along with a

number of other English names. Ice shoves are generally classified as onshore ice pushes caused by wind currents, changes in temperature, and other causes. As meteorologist Matthew Capucci explained it in a twenty twenty Washington Post article, there are a lot of explainers out these out there that often pop up when exceptional or notable examples of ice shoves occur, and

this I believe is one of those cases. This meteorologist pointed out that as the wind blows over a long sheet of ice, it can give that sheet of ice enough momentum that it can't stop when pushed against the shore. Instead, it fragments, and then the fragments pile up in heaps of shattered ice on the coast. Conditions have to be just right. The ice has to be thin enough, it has to be brittle enough, and it generally only piles

up a few feet onto the shore. But there are of course exceptional examples where things get much higher, or they go up the shore a little bit more. Apparently some places are more ideal for it. I saw Lake Erie pointed out in this article due to its length and particular orientation, and again there's some pretty exceptional examples.

In June of twenty eleven, along the Chuckchisea coast in Alaska, ice shove piled up fifteen feet, and I've seen it record heights as high as like forty feet in some cases. So that's like a forty foot wall of ice fragments piling up along the coast.

quote mean? I'm taking it out of context. The article had this footage of the ice shove piled up next to Jim and Linda's Lake Shore supper Club in the town of Pipe appears to be like a single floor building. But still that is a lot of ice. Like that's a huge wall of moving ice, or I mean it's no longer moving, but still it has moved up. It has advanced in a way that is concerning.

the time. And coming back to our point earlier, there are a number of other more common things that could be dangerous about the ice and the ice at the edge of the coast. Or of course, even when the ice has melted, like the water's edge can still be dangerous, especially to a young child.

discussed in the show before. These are also found in the Arctic, and there's an entire chapter in Lopez's book Arctic Dreams where he talks about about this, about the northern lights and so forth. But basically, ice blink is just the bright white reflection in the clouds above an

expanse of ice. So if you're at sea in the Arctic and you see ice blink in the distance and you know what you're looking at for and looking at, of course you can navigate by it, knowing that this means that there's likely a large expanse of ice in that direction. Likewise, the opposite is true with water sky. So if you're on a great expanse of ice and the overcast sky is bright with reflected light, you might see a dark patch of sky in the distance that

indicates a body of open water beneath it. So in other words, it's you know, it's the presence of dark clouds over an area of open water in a region that is otherwise frozen. And this, you know, these are signs that indigenous peoples would have known about and used to navigate, and techniques that then would have been adopted

by individuals exploring from other parts to the world. It reminds me of some of what we discussed in our episodes about Pacific navigation and how there are signs that the informed mind could look for in the sky that would indicate the presence of an island.

relative to you. But that was truly one of the most mind blowing series I think we've ever done, because it just opened my eyes to the fact that there is so much information in the world that can be exploited if you know what to look for, and to a person who doesn't know what to look for, it's completely invisible. You'd have no idea that it corresponded to any kind of navigationally relevant facts.

little bit. Now, most icebergs are indeed white in color, but of course sometimes icebergs of other colors can be found, apparently especially coming off of Antarctica, and we can talk about reasons for that. But the white, relatively opaque surface of a common iceberg is caused by how ice accumulates, which is by adding layers of snow. In most cases, so icebergs typically begin as part of a glacier or a polar ice sheet, which eventually breaks off in pieces

and floats away in the ocean. So it originally formed along with the rest of the glacier. And the way that forms is snow falls down from the sky, It piles up, it gets compressed, and if it doesn't melt seasonally, more snow falls on top of it and just keeps piling up and getting more and more compressed until it

forms this solid chunk or sheet of ice. This process can become cumulative over many snowfalls, many seasons, many years, and eventually it forms this glacier, and then a piece of this glacier or ice sheet can break off and float away in the water. So what determines the difference in color, Well, when you see a white iceberg, what you're seeing there, apparently is the relatively uncompressed upper or outer layers of the snowpack that is forming the ice

on top of it. That relatively uncompressed snow contains lots of little imperfections like air bubbles especially, and just lots of little reflective surfaces within the relatively low density outer layers. And these little imperfections and air bubbles and things tend to scatter light. They reflect all frequencies of light equally, And of course when you combine all colors of light, you get white light, so that light bounces off and

it appears white to our eyes. But when you're making a glacier, as each layer of ice becomes more deeply buried in a glacier or iceberg, it gets pressed harder by the layers above, so new snowfalls the ice load above it becomes heavier, and the imperfections tend to get squeezed out, like air bubbles get compressed and removed. The ice crystals that were originally snowflakes get squeezed and they form larger crystals of dense ice. So this dens or

more compressed ice does not reflect all frequencies of light equally. Instead, it starts to behave in a different way. It absorbs or some wavelengths, especially longer wavelengths toward the red end of the spectrum colors like red, orange, and yellow, whereas shorter wavelengths on the green, blue, indigo, violet into the spectrum are less likely to be absorbed and more likely

to bounce back out. So if you see an iceberg that looks opaque white on the outside, it is probably covered with snow or uncompressed surface ice or ice that has been weathered and scratched up in some way. If you see an iceberg that looks a more cloudy blue, you're probably seeing the exposed, compressed layers of ice from an older glacier or from deep inside the glacier formation.

And sometimes icebergs also look blue and a bit more translucenter even transparent when they somehow capsize in the water, bringing up the smoother blue portion that was once under the waterline. And there are also some other formation methods for blue spectrum and translucent bergs, and frankly, with these they look not only beautiful but downright shocking.

where the snow has been piled on. But if you're able to look down into the crack, you will see progressively bluer and bluer shades, Like the light coming out is a deeper blue the deeper you go down. And again this is a result of that ice being more compressed.

freezing of sea water leading to the creation of marine ice. So, according to Jansen, this kind of ice can build up underneath ice shelves, and an ice shelf is where part of a land based glacier extends past dry land and juts out over the sea, so it's like a shelf

over the water. And under the ice shelves of Antarctica, actual frozen seawater can agglomerate into formations that can eventually become icebergs, Whereas the snow that falls layer by layer and accumulates into a glacier on land is mostly pure water. Ice that accumulates by the freezing of sea water, which is more rare, comes with a lot of stuff in it. So because it's seawater, right, so it can have mineral dust and just you know, grains of rocks and various

kinds of minerals. That can bring different colors to a resulting iceberg that comes from the freezing of the seawater. Maybe it has a lot of iron particles in it, or maybe it has black looking you know, volcanic lava minerals. It can also have a lot of dead stuff in it, dead or living organic matter. And apparently marine ice that forms this way out of seawater with a lot of dead cells from organic matter can tend to be yellow

or green in color. And so if you've ever seeing yellow or green icebergs, especially coming from around Antarctica, because these types of marine ice iceberg, they tend to form only in very cold conditions because again they have to be formed out of seawater. Seawater, having greater salt content, is harder to freeze than fresh water. So basically all of this, like multicolored ice made out of seawater, only forms around Antarctica. Anything from the Arctic North will typically

be white or blue. This marine ice that forms around Antarctica sometimes has these like gross amazing you know, like green jade or yellow death colors, and a lot of this tends to be organic contaminants. Meanwhile, marine ice that forms underneath these ice shelves, but doesn't have much in the way of contaminants, tends to be very translucent or even almost transparent, appearing you can see deep into it.

So this is where you get these these strange looking bergs that are almost as clear as glass and a very dark color, almost a deep blue or even a black. You can also get striped icebergs, and this happens when you have an ice shelf hanging out over the ocean and cracks form along the submerged portion, and these areas can flood with seawater, forming stripes of different colors and

opacity than the surrounding ice. So maybe you've got some ice that's, you know, the regular sort of blue ice, and then it fills in with some marine ice from seawater that had a bunch of dead organic matter in it, so it might have like stripes of yellow or stripes of green. But I want to move on to another

iceberg related topic, which is icebergs beyond Earth. So you might kind of wonder, well, how could that even be possible, because we know that Earth is the only planet in the Solar System with liquid water oceans on the surface. Other planets may have had them long ago in the past, but not today. We do know that there are some some other objects, some moons in the Solar System that have liquid oceans underneath the surface, like Jupiter's moon Europa.

But there is one other object in the Solar System that does have liquid seas in lakes and rivers on its surface, though they are not made out of water. That space object is Saturn's moon Titan, which is Saturn's largest moon, the second largest moon in the whole Solar System after Jupiter's Ganymede, and the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmosphere which is made mostly

of nitrogen and is in fact extremely thick. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Titan is about fifty or sixty percent greater than the pressure at sea level on Earth. So one comparison I've come across is that just standing in the air on the surface of Titan would feel kind of like it would be a level of pressure similar to being fifteen meters or fifty feet underwater on Earth.

Oh wow, that's thick. Titan is also extremely cold, with an average surface temperature of one hundred and eighty three of a negative one hundred and eighty three degrees celsius or negative two hundred and ninety seven degrees fahrenheit. That's really cold. Of course, that is too cold to support liquid water on the surface. It is not going to

have water oceans. But nevertheless, Titan does have large stable systems of rivers, lakes, and seas made out of not water, but liquid hydrocarbons, especially liquid methane, ethane, and some liquid nitrogen. So methane is a hydrocarbon that we know here on Earth as well chemical formula H four. On Earth, it's pretty much always in the form of a gas. Ethane.

Another hydrocarbon is C two H six, and together methane and ethane contribute to a kind of atmospheric chemical cycle on Titan that has some resemblances to but also some differences from the water cycle on Earth. So, like, methane is released apparently from deep inside the interior of Titan,

and then it forms a sort of weather system. It gets broken down by sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and there are there is some kind of methane or methane downstream product weather system where you know, these these organic molecules fall down from above, so you get like rains and snows that have these hydrocarbon features. So one of the consequences of this wet hydrocarbon environment is a surface with snaking rivers and massive lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, especially

clustered around the Moon's polar regions. So the three largest of these hydrocarbon seas in order of size are Kraken Mare, Lygea Mare, and Punga Mare, which are all situated around the Moon's north pole. Mythology notes, by the way, I think we know the kraken, but the Punga is the name of a being in Maori mythology who is a sun of the sea deity Tangaroa, but also the fog there are of all creatures considered strange and ugly, including

lizards and sharks. Ligia was the name was a name that appeared in Greek mythology in multiple contexts, but always associated with minor seed deities like the Nereids or the Sirens, and also in a creepy Edgar Allan Poe short story where I think the deal is Ligia was the narrator's wife, and she died, and then he marries another woman, and then she dies, but then resurrects from the dead as his first wife, Ligia.

how we classify them. These bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan were documented extensively through radar imaging carried out by the Cassini Mission orbiter over a period of many years in the in the two thousands and twenty tens. So I wanted to zoom in on some of these different radar images of Legmre, the second largest sea on Titan, and these photos were taken at intervals between two thousand and seven and twenty fifteen. Rob, I've got these for

you to look at here. So what we see appears to be a sort of flower shaped peninsula of land jetting out into the sea and off of one of the petals of this flower of land, there is a mystery. In the image from two thousand and seven, the land terminates and there's just nothing but dark lake beyond it. Then, in an image from twenty thirteen, suddenly there is what appears to be an island off the same coastal feature.

Then in another image from twenty fourteen, the island seems to have faded into just a wisp of discoloration, something that looks like it could be you know, I'm using too much of an Earth analogy here, but it looks like it could be like an atoll, or like a bank of shallows. And then by twenty fifteen, the island has vanished completely and only the dark liquid remains once more. What the heck or how is the topography of Titan changing like that? Are islands appearing and disappearing on this

alien sea? So these types of anomalies have been referred to in the press as the magic islands of Titan, since they seem to appear and disappear when we're not looking, and it's still not known for sure what they are, but there are some ideas, some proposals. You would need something that would be present long enough to have a reasonable chance of being caught in images taken by the orbiter, but also something that would disappear completely within a couple

of years. So there have been various suggestions, including floating hydrocarbon solids like particles that have fallen from the atmosphere, maybe a sort of carbon based dust floating on the lake, or perhaps massive upwellings of nitrogen gas bubbles appearing as bright spots on the radar image. But just recently in January twenty twenty four, a group of researchers suggested another possibility, which is hydrocarbon icebergs, basically porous honeycomb like frozen masses

of hydrocarbons. So the paper in question here is by Zinting Uau, Julia Garver, Xijiang, and Patricia mcgugen. It's called the Fate of Simple Organics on Titan's Surface, a theoretical perspective published in Geophysical Research Letters. So the authors here are saying, in the atmosphere of Titan, you've got these simple compounds like methane that get broken down, maybe by exposure to sunlight, and they recombine and end up transformed

into bigger, more complex organic molecules. And many of these carbon based compounds freeze solid and fall to the surface. Now what happens when these hydrocarbon ices fall on the surface of Titan's lakes. It seems that most of them probably sink to the bottom, becoming new layers of lake bed sediment. Because remember it's peculiar to water that frozen water floats on the surface of liquid water. Most frozen solids increase in density and would be likely to sink

in liquid, but not all frozen hydrocarbons would sink. The author's right quote, imagine a sponge full of holes. If the solids are like this, with twenty five percent to sixty percent of their volume being empty space, they can float. Some solids, like hydrogen cyanide ice can also float due

to surface tension effects. And I was reading in a press release the lead author ut San Antonio planetary scientist Zinting Yu has compared these icebergs to the way that porous volcanic pummice can float on the surface of oceans on Earth before eventually becoming saturated and sinking. So in this paper, the authors created a model of how various materials would behave on the lake surface, and they concluded that it wouldn't work unless conditions were just right. But

if they were right, it would work. You could have these floating icebergs of hydrocarbons. So to read from the press release summary, quote used modeling suggested individual clumps are likely too small to float by themselves, but if enough clumps mass together near the shore, large pieces could break off and float away, similar to how glaciers calve on Earth calving they're referring to, yeah, parts of a glacier

breaking off and falling into the water. The press release continues with a combination of a bigger size and the right porosity, these organic glaciers could explain the magic island phenomenon. So the issue is not settled. This is yet another proposal for what it could be to explain these these

magic islands in the radar images. But I kind of hope this explanation has proven right because I love the idea of icebergs on titan Maybe maybe that would like warn us away from the humorus of trying to launch a Titanic on the Lakes of Titan. I don't know, But then again, I guess if they're very porous and honeycomb like, maybe they wouldn't represent much of a threat to bodes. I'm not sure.

If we're doing a third ice episode, we may go on to some other topic, but potentially we could come back to ice in the future if that's the case, because just in Lopez's book, I mean, he has whole stretches where he's talking about like different types of ice and the behavior of ice, and of course indigenous beliefs and traditions concerning ice. There's a lot we could cover. And likewise, we know a lot of you out there. You have direct experience with ice in ways that we don't.

You may have takes on some of the things we've discussed here, observations, traditions, et cetera, and we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed listener mail on Monday's a

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