ICE

Winter is still going strong and with that in mind it is time pay homage to what wonder material that causes pain, joy and cursing across this country. No not Chocolate. Ice, the pavement of the north, the unfortunately the meduim that hockey is played on, the cause of car and plane crashes, and some thing to put in your drink if you have the luck of having access to drink. You can even make glaciers out of it, scare people with images of calving ice burges and call it global warming. Specal note in southern Iran they have glaciers of salt,

But that is neither here nor there. For this set of images I am digging into some older ones form December 2006, down in the Okanagan valley, we had a wonder cold snap and Mission creek froze over in larges streches and produces an array of odd and beautiful features.



Mission Creek, the Moon, Pool, the water in this is accutally above the normal stream surface and some how froze it self into a pool.



A very close look at some Ice on Mission creek, the humidity form the running water caused things to constantly recrystalize producing large clear ice crystals



Looking up stream from by the Moon Pool


I have mentioned the Ice Road that is in place right now, I dont as yet have any photos from it or of it, what I focused on is my pet glacier. The shop I log core in has a second half where core is cut for sampling. Rock saws need water to work so naturaly there is a large amount of run off and after sever months of cutting at continuous sub zero temperatures a large amount of ice builds up. Because it tends to be at least be low -10C and often in the -20's the water from the saws cools quickly. this net result is that the water and cuttings mix seems to exist some where between a normal stream near the discharge point and something like a very runny pahoehoe lava flow on down stream end.





Unfortunately that glacier is not house broken and so it tried to eat some core boxes. It took three people a day to chip out the boxes which where three deep under the ice.



Our nothern pahoehoe,

With there being a beter part of 1 m worth of ice in some places form this saw discharge and with the ice sheet being on a small hill I wonder when it will start to creep producing mini cravaes to get your boots stuck in, possibly shearing the pine timbers burrined in the ice into tooth picks. Alternately this hole lawn sized sheet of ice could be cover with a mylar blanket and nomex foam to protect it from the heat of summer and once the temperature drops below zero again the cover could be removed and the Ice sheet could be fed its diet of water and rock flour, so that in the years to come a glacier could be grown on site. This glacier could then be coaxed into growing over the then abandoned mine workings providing a nature remidiation for the complex,