Washington - A classic symbol of winter’s chill, rows of icicles hanging from roofs and trees show off the simple artistry of nature. But there’s more to them than their fleeting beauty: icicles are one of the unsolved mysteries of physics.
“Despite seeing them all the time, icicles are actually poorly understood,” said Stephen W Morris, a physicist at the University of Toronto who has been studying their shapes and ripples since 2007.
His recent research focuses solely on the ripples: no matter how big an icicle is, the hallmark ripples or ribs that form along its sides always have the same wavelength, or distance between one peak to the next – about a centimetre between neighbouring bumps. But no one knows why.
Some theorists have linked this regularity to surface tension between the thin film of water flowing on the surface of the icicle and the surrounding air.
But Morris has found that a key factor is something much simpler: salt.
“What we discovered is an extremely strange fact. You need a small concentration of salt to produce ripples,” he said. For some reason, the periodic ribbing has to do with impurities in the water.
In Morris’s experiments, icicles made with extremely pure water lacked ripples. Even tap water contains enough salt to create the pattern.
Run-off from melted snow contains salts such as calcium or sodium – much less than is found in tap water, but enough to create ripples – picked up from rooftops or air pollution. Morris’s lab melted free-growing icicles taken off a garage to test their salt levels and found that they were within the right range of saltiness.
In nature, icy spikes form when accumulated snow or ice melts in direct sunlight or through contact with a warmer surface, such as the roof of a heated house. The resulting water drips off, refreezing when it reaches a pocket of cooler air and forming an icy column that builds up over time.
Also, there’s a temperature balance involved: the weather needs to be just right for icicles to form. Too cold, and everything turns to solid ice; too hot, and the dripping water won’t have the chance to refreeze.
With the help of his graduate student Antony Szu-Han Chen, Morris has grown hundreds of icy spikes with a home-made icicle maker. Water drips slowly on to a sharpened wooden support suspended inside an insulated, refrigerated box; the support is slowly rotated to encourage symmetry. The scientists carefully control the water composition and air temperature, and even mimic wind with little fans.
Growing your own icicles isn’t speedy: it takes about eight hours to make a 50cm tapered spike.
A digital camera takes pictures of the icicle as it spins so the topography of its silhouette can be analysed using special computer software.
Morris’s first foray into icicle research focused on the overall tapered cone shape rather than the detailed ribbed features. He took cues from physicist Raymond Goldstein’s lab at the University of Arizona. Goldstein and his colleagues came up with a theoretical model that explained the shape of a growing icicle based on Goldstein’s previous work on stalactites.
“The physics of stalactite formation is very different from icicle formation,” said Goldstein, now at the University of Cambridge.
Stalactites grow through the depositing of calcium carbonate, while icicles bulk up in areas where their thin film of water freezes. Nonetheless, the same mathematics applies. Ripples on stalactites have the same wavelength as their icy counterparts.
“An individual icicle has bumps and wiggles and imperfections, but if you average over many, it is consistent with this theory.”
However, Goldstein’s model of icicles does not take ripples or salt content into account.
Although Morris and Chen have found a crucial piece of the puzzle – the role of salt in icicle ribbing – mysteries abound.
They still don’t know why, for example, changing air temperature or salt concentration has no effect on the ripple wavelength or why the wavelength size is always about a centimetre. One thing that does depend on the saltiness is how the ripples morph as the icicle grows. For small amounts of salt, ice build-up tends to favour the top curve of the ripple closer to the icicle’s stem. No ice actually moves, but the ripple appears to shift upward as the icicles get bigger. So over time, the ripples seem to move slowly up the length of the icicle.
Saltiness is certainly a factor with ripples, but why? No one knows. Morris speculates that it could have to do with a layer of “spongy ice” between the thin film of water and the solid ice.
Spongy ice is a mix of ice and water that makes the surface microscopically rough, and sponginess very much depends on how salty the water is.
For now, Morris has looked only into the effects of table salt, but additional materials – other kinds of salt, different minerals, even soap – are on deck for testing.
“Even a very simple-looking thing is kind of the thread you pull on, and it unravels a whole lot of complex things,” Morris said. “It’s quite a chase.”
Goldstein agrees: “The only thing that mattered to me was the aesthetics of it. I was simply fascinated by the beautiful shapes.
“The only driving force was the beauty of what we found in nature.” – The Washington Post
Why your tongue gets stuck to an icicle
Those icicles can be so enticing. But licker, beware. Whether it’s an icicle, an ice cube or (less frequently, we hope) a metal pole, sometimes the tongue hits something very cold, and it won’t let go. Why is that?
The easy answer is that the saliva on our tongues freezes solid, creating a steadfast connection. But there’s more to it than that, scientists say. For instance, why do our tongues rarely stick to an icy-cold plastic or wooden object?
You can blame something called thermal conductivity, which is a measure of how fast heat flows through a material. It can vary wildly depending on the type of material.
The higher the conductivity, the faster heat moves. Your fingers may have learnt a painful lesson in this when you burnt them trying to stir a boiling pot with a metal spoon, which is an excellent conductor. But with a wooden spoon, you feel barely any heat: the thermal conductivity of stainless steel is 150 times that of wood.
Objects in contact with each other attempt to reach a thermal equilibrium, so something at a higher temperature (the boiling soup) will transfer heat to the cooler object (the spoon).
Same thing with your tongue and anything icy: it will surely rob your warm tongue of heat.
However, the key question is: How rapidly will it do so? A metal pole exposed to freezing temperatures will quickly steal heat away from your tongue, faster than body heat can come to the tongue’s rescue. The result is that your saliva freezes solid inside all the nooks and crannies of your tongue. You are stuck.
Frozen plastics and wood are not as good at sucking heat away quickly, so your body heat wins. Ice isn’t as efficient as metal is at sucking heat away, but it’s more conductive than plastic and wood.
Ideally, warm water can be used to melt the frozen bond and free whatever appendage happens to be stuck. Breathing warm air on to it may also help. But perhaps the best advice is to avoid getting cemented in the first place. – Washington Post