Frank Zamboni, inventor of the ice surfacing machine, was born on this date in 1901. Here are 10 things you might not know about ice:
Because ice is a naturally occurring crystalline inorganic solid with an ordered structure, it is classified as a mineral.
The earliest mention of making ice artificially dates back to the 13th century. Arab historian Ibn Abu Usaybia wrote about it in a book about medicine. He’s actually writing about even older writings about ice making by someone called Ibn Bakhtawayhi, about whom nothing is known.
The oldest indoor ice rink is in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s called Matthews Arena and was built between 1909 and 1910. Incidentally, the word “rink” is an old Scottish word meaning “course” which was originally used to describe the area on which the sport of curling was played.
If it’s cold enough, ice can be used as a building material. I expect you’re all thinking of igloos right now, but there are also the ice hotels where absolutely everything including the drinking glasses, is made from ice, and also a pier made from ice in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound to make docking of supply vessels easier.
An ice storm is what you get when snow enters a warm layer of the atmosphere and melts into drops of Rain, then passes through a cold layer of air which isn’t thick enough for the rain to re-freeze. When they hit a cold surface on the ground, they do freeze, resulting in a thick coating of ice on surfaces which can be treacherous.
Why is ice slippery? You may have been taught that it’s because friction from your foot/tyres raises the temperature of the ice ever so slightly, which causes a micro-film of Water to form and that’s what’s slippy. Scientists now believe it’s to do with the difference in density between ice and water which for all sorts of complicated reasons even physicists don’t even fully understand, the surface molecules can’t bond properly to the ones underneath.
There is such a thing as a volcano which spews ice instead of magma. Needless to say, it’s not on Earth, but on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. It happens when ice deep below the surface gets heated and turned into a vapour that erupts into the moon’s atmosphere as ice particles.
It’s said that indigenous peoples from very cold climates have many words for different types of ice. There are certainly many types of sea ice including brash, frazil, nilas, and pancake ice.
Glaciers that cover more than 50,000 square kilometers (19,305 square miles) of land are called ice sheets. The ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are so big that they affect the force of gravity exerted by the Earth.
The world’s oldest ice is at the bottom of the ice sheet on Antarctica. It is thought to be around one million years old.
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