Quirks

A long long time ago but I can still remember and the musing makes me smile.
I knew if there was a chance I'd help science to advance and we'd be happy for a while.
But my endeavour makes me shiver. With each new post I delivered bad news upon Usenet, trolls and fools got upset.
I can't remember why I tried but truth will stand above all the lies. And now it's my turn to deride a science that let the whole world down.

And this is me singing:
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.sci.weather/browse_frm/thread/2ed71c14d52562bc/fd5a192336e99151?lnk=gst&q=frost+heave#fd5a192336e99151

1. http://www.jarkman.co.uk/album/molehill.htm

Any ideas on how this happens ?

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3. I saw this in Canada in '92 at about 10k feet in the Rockies!

My cousin who was walking with us told me that it's a regular thing, and it's apparently to do with the way the ground freezes then thaws then freezes again and it gets pushed up from the bottom.

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4. So the ice is being extruded through gaps in the soil by repeated refreezing?

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5. That was the impression I got, it was also something to do with the fact that the ground was frozen so the ice had nowhere else to go but up.

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6. This process is known as "frost heave". You'll find many references to it if you do a Google search.

It can play havoc with soil thermometers, gradually lifting them after a day of so of this effect -even breaking them in extreme circumstances.

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7. In the winter of 1981/2 in the north-east, frost heave cracked my concrete drive from end-to-end (about 6m ), lifted the foundations on my porch (they went down again after the thaw, but left great cracks in the brickwork) and lifted one of my brick gateposts, but not the other, such that the gates were 3" out of horizontal alignment.

The last effect never quite righted itself

Pretty powerful forces are unleashed when water freezes into ice. Which begs the question: Has anyone got a figure for it?
And, does the speed at which the ice forms affect this at all?

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8. >Any ideas on how this happens ?

No, but it doesn't just happen in molehills. Happened during this winter in my garden (bare earth around during a re-landscaping).
Amazing to walk on.
You sort of sink by several inches!

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9. >Any ideas on how this happens ?

There was a similar thing in new Scientist a while ago - but my access to the online archive is down, so I can't get to the article If it resolves I'll post the details.

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And this is the answer folks:

10. They look like mini-pingos to me! See:
http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/frost.htm

The link no longer wors try:
http://www.aip.org/aip/search_results.html?cx=004445072414534619134%3Avptvposetya&q=pingoes&cof=FORID%3A11&siteurl=www.aip.org%2Fphysnews%2Fgraphics%2Fhtml%2Ffrost.htm&ref=www.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3DD%26q%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.aip.org%2Fphysnews%2Fgraphics%2Fhtml%2Ffrost.htm%26usg%3DAFQjCNG7HMYIVh5Jcu8Gb_7Uvg95BEveaQ&sa.x=0&sa.y=0

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And here:

11. The mechanism was recently reported in Science",(17 JAN 03) by M.A. Messler and B.T. Werner:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol299/issue5605/cover.shtml

The cover of the issue shows a field in Norway after repeated cycles of freezing and thawing during the "thawed" part of the cycle. There are even more interesting pictures in the text of the article.

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Which of course begs an answer to the question of why they are craters and not mounds.

Here is my idea:
The mounds fall in once the ice sublimes.

12. They wanted money from me before I can see the article (I was directed to the "send them lots of money" page from the free membership link.)

What I did see looked really interesting. Almost lunar.

(I never liked that theory about meteors striking the moon causing those craters, they just didn't look right.)

(Well they don't do they?)

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And this is why you know no more in the 10 years since this cropped up:

13. Maybe not, Michael. But it's a theory supported by everyone in the business.

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Also not found:

14. > What I did see looked really interesting. Almost lunar.

Download http://mmyotte.free.fr/backup/380.pdf (681806 bytes)

Jean-Michel

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15. > Download http://mmyotte.free.fr/backup/380.pdf (681806 bytes)

> Jean-Michel

Thanks.

I had a bash at translating it in the geology group.
There is a list as long as your arm of dedications at the end of it. With all those experts all eager to spend money on the subject, why couldn't they have picked one to go to the moon with all those astronauts?

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For the down to eath brigade:

16. >http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol299/issue5605/cover.shtml

I don't think is quite the same underlying effect.

AIUI, the sorting effect is encountered in regions of poor soil quality, with little humus (i.e. poor tensile and shear strength) and they're fast-draining.

It occurs when freezing under the soil heaves up tussocks of soil that then shed their stones to the spaces between them. Developing large features needs a flat plain left undisturbed for a long period.

For the molehill photos, http://www.jarkman.co.uk/album/molehill.htm there is clearly an effect where ice is freezing an inch or two below the surface and the ice crystallisation has this unusual columnar form.

The soil lifting (in common with the stone sorting) is just the
frost heave we'd expect from this.

So why is the ice freezing in this narrow layer, and nowhere else?
Why the unusual crystal shape?

The site is in South Wales (Pontypool Park) and is a steep grassy slope with a large mole population. It's regularly waterlogged, and we often see springs at the lower molehills while the upper ones are obviously the active tunnels.

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The first part of the reply 16 was actually describing lunar conditions.

That about wraps it up two more replies:

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17. > Any ideas on how this happens ?

Can't remember the term, but ask a geomorphologist for a definition. Happens here (North Carolina, USA) all the time in winter.

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18. >Happens here (North Carolina, USA) all the time in winter.

I think you are talking about the formation of pingos in periglacial regions.

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Originally posted by American Institute of Physics -1997:

FROST HEAVING is a process by which ice columns can grow like plants out of moist soils.

In the Arctic, structures hundreds of meters wide and 50 m tall ("pingos") can form in this way.

Where does the energy come from to thrust ice upwards against the force of gravity?

Hisashi Ozawa, now at the Nagaoka Institute for Snow and Ice Studies in Japan (ozawa@nisis.nagaoka.bosai.go.jp) observes frost heaving in the lab. He grows ice columns above a reservoir of supercooled water (water below its freezing point kept in a liquid state).

A microporous filter (approximating the role of Arctic soil) between water and ice keeps the ice from intruding into the liquid.

Ozawa believes that newly formed ice is able to push against gravity not through any conventional mechanical force but by a thermodynamic tendency by which the system as a whole (water plus ice) gains entropy.

In principle, one could build a "frost engine" which could produce a heaving pressure of a megapascal per degree of supercooling.

Similarly one might make a "helium frost engine" operating near 0 K and a "metal frost engine" operating at blast-furnace temperatures.

One could also purify solutions (separate solvents from solutes) without distillation. (In Physical Review E, September 1997; figures at Physics News Graphics.)

http://www.aip.org/pnu/1997/physnews.334.htm

Back in the day I postd the thread on:

Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail
From: Weatherlaw...@hotmail.com (Michael McNeil)
Newsgroups: uk.sci.weather,sci.geo.meteorology,alt.misc.forteana
Subject: Re: Frozen molehills and bizarre ice crystals.

Here are some pictures to colour your dreams:

In the Appollo missions they found there was something wrong with the steering on the navigation devices.

It turned out to be unusually strong concentrations of dense matter in the dark discs on the top of the picture.

They were a phenomenon first noticed by the British during the survey of India in the late 1800's:

Mass-cons or gravity anomalies.

The earth has them too (the mid Atlantic Ridge affects satellite orbits and, after friction, is the greatest cost of fuel in them.)

What do you suppose; that they are the dry regions:
And that everywhere else holds so much water that the average mass of the planet is only 3/5th of ours?

I think it may be so.

Another thing is that you can't have mountains without volcanic activity (again, only my opinion) so where do the lunar mountains come from?

Solving those mysteries may explain that radial phenomenon.
But don't hold your breath.

One further thought:
If there is water close enough to the surface to be readily got at, it means the space exploration can be carried out.
Maybe not in the lifetimes of anyone alive today. Maybe not for a couple of centuries.

But we will have the ability reasonably soon.

Originally posted by Weatherlawyer:

If there is water, it means that space exploration can be carried out.
Maybe not in the lifetimes of anyone alive today. Maybe not for a couple of centuries.
But we will have the ability reasonably soon.

The generation that builds the second generation moon launches will regard us the way we regard people from the Mongolfier brothers' era. (1780's)

Slow, backward, superstitious, dirty, ignorant and foolish. And entirely forget the stupendous engineering achievements and quantum leaps of logic required just to get men off the ground.

For it had only been a couple of centuries before that when the telescope was refined enough to use it on the planets to good effect. (Early 1600's) And it wasn't that long from the time that heliocentricity was an acceptable belief. (Late 1680's, thus about a century later.)

Just as it was a different world then, so it will be an entirely different world to ours.

Originally posted by Unasia:

I'd love a nice telescope and live up north, it gets dark, real dark, whole other sky.

The problem is that astronomy is a lonely habit. And like meteorology, a difficult one to break.

Technology has always been in the wrong hands.

It's like the army after the fight. The sons of politicians -the very failures who cause wars in the first place, get to hold the fort, so to speak.

The only decent ally general produced in WW2 was sidelined by his second because of politics. All the others were just rehashing WW 1.

The same with science. To get ahead you need to upset as few people as possible while publishing as many papers as possible.

Which means that most scientific papers are written by people afraid to think.