Six more cool facts about water ice and dry ice

For my first ten cool facts about ice, visit this post. And now, on to six more!

1. There are a couple of places in the world-- Quebec City and Jukasjaarvi, Sweden among them, where you can stay in a hotel made of ice.  These hotels are a little fancier than the ice castle occupied overnight by the Diva in my novel The Ice Castle.

My sister-in-law has stayed in an ice hotel and slept in an ice bed.  Her verdict?  "It was cold."

2. Carbon dioxide exists in liquid form only at high pressure, above 5 atmospheres.  This is the pressure you would feel 132 feet below the ocean surface.

3.  How to make dry ice: Take a carbon dioxide-rich mixture of gases, and pressurize it until it turns to liquid.  Then release the pressure.  This allows some of the liquid to vaporize, which cools the remaining carbon dioxide liquid enough to transform it into the solid known as dry ice.

4. Dry ice, as it sublimates (vaporizes), can attract mosquitoes or bedbugs, which are drawn to carbon dioxide. How about a dry ice mosquito trap? Or placing an open thermos of dry ice beside that old couch your friend is lending you, before you lie down?

5. Mars has polar snowstorms of dry ice snowflakes.  The snowflakes are very small, about the size of human red blood cells.  Paul Doherty showed that carbon dioxide snowflakes will not have the beautiful crystalline structure of H2O snowflakes.  Instead, they'll be cubes, octahedrons, and cuboctahedrons, which are basically cubes with the corners sawed off.  For more about dry ice on Mars, read Paul Doherty's blog post on the topic.

6. If all the floating sea ice of the Arctic melted, how much would sea level rise?  Not at all.  Floating ice already displaces the same volume of water it would occupy if it melted into water.  For the same reason, the water level in a glass filled with water and floating ice will not rise as the ice melts.  (If the ice cubes are packed in to the glass and not actually floating, the result may be different.)

Note, however, that if all the sea ice of the Arctic melted, that would reflect a warming of the oceans.  Warmer water expands, so we would sea some sea level rise - not because of the melting, but because of the expansion that comes with warming.

Dry ice and water ice - ten cool facts

Interested in ice?  In honor of the publication of The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music, here are 10 random facts about ice.

1)  Regular ice is frozen water.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and it’s very cold, below -78 degrees Celsius.  Unlike water, carbon dioxide does not go though a liquid stage as it cools from a gas stage to a solid stage.  Similarly, dry ice doesn’t melt.  Instead, it changes directly from solid into a vapor or gaseous form. This change is called sublimation.

2)  Ice covers about 10 percent of the Earth’s land mass and about 7 percent of its oceans.

3)  Water is one of very few compounds in the universe that expands as it cools from liquid to solid form.  That’s why ice floats on water.  It’s also why a closed bottle of water, left out in the freezing cold, can push its top off or even burst.

4)  The reason ice looks cloudy is because of tiny air bubbles trapped in the water as it freezes.  You can actually get clearer ice cubes by starting off with warm or hot water, which has less dissolved air in it than cool water coming straight from a frothy faucet.

5) The water at the bottom of the deepest oceans is actually -4 degrees Celsius.  Why is it still liquid when it’s below freezing?  Remember, water has to expand to form ice. The water at the bottom of the ocean, crushed under all that water pressure, can’t expand to form ice crystals, even though it’s very cold.

6) Dry ice sinks in water.  Its specific gravity (density compared to water) is about 1.5.  If you drop it in water, though, you’ll get wild bubbling and an outpouring of what seems to be cold steam.  That’s why dry ice is great to cool your punch at a Halloween party.

7) The ice in comets is not the nice crystalline structure we know.  Instead, it’s an amorphous (without form) random arrangement of molecules known as “glassy ice.”  On earth, glassy ice can only form when water is rapidly cooled to -137C.

8) Sea ice is important to regulating global temperature, because the white, bright ice reflects back 80% of the light that hits it and helps to keep the ocean cool.  Once sea ice melts, the dark-colored ocean absorbs ninety percent of the sunlight, leading to greater warming.

9) Algae grow between the cracks in sea ice and even on the underside of the ice, providing food for tiny shrimp-like krill throughout the dark, cold arctic winter.

10) In the science fiction book Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, ice-nine is a special form of ice crystal that causes any water it comes in contact with to solidify immediately into more ice-nine.  Throwing a tiny piece of ice-nine in the ocean could instantly dry up all the water in the world.

11)  Bonus fact:  In The Ice Castle: An Adventure in Music, Ivan and Daphne are stuck in the Land of Winter, where social status and opportunity are determined solely by how well a person sings.  Spring will come to the Land of Winter only when the Diva sings her way free of a castle built of ice.

For more cool facts on ice, check here.

For facts on diamonds, try here.

And for facts on glass, visit here.