archiemcphee: Here in the northern hemisphere spring is beginning to get underway, which means all s
archiemcphee: Here in the northern hemisphere spring is beginning to get underway, which means all sorts of things are starting to bloom, but today the Department of Awesome Natural Phenomena would like to share photos of beautiful flowers that you won’t find in any garden. These wondrous white blossoms are called Frost Flowers. They’re ice crystals most commonly found growing on young sea ice or thin lake ice during calm, very cold conditions. They form when the atmosphere is significantly colder than the underlying ice, usually when the temperature difference between the two is at least 15°C.As the warmer, wet air meets the overlying cold air it becomes supersaturated and can condense as hoar-frost like crystals on the sea ice surface. In general, frost flowers only form in relatively windless conditions; in high winds the supersaturated layer is scrubbed from the surface and blowing snow obscures the ice surface.These otherworldly photos were taken by UW PhD students Matthias Wietz and Jeff Bowman, and Professor Jody Deming while working on an Arctic study combining oceanography, microbiology, and planetary sciences in the central Arctic Ocean. Their work was part of the Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program:“Their single focus was the study of frost flowers, a strange phenomenon where frost grows from imperfections in the surface ice amid extreme sub-zero temperatures nearing -22C or -7.6F, forming spiky structures that have been found to house microorganisms. In fact, the bacteria found in the frost flowers is much more dense than in the frozen water below it, meaning each flower is essentially a temporary ecosystem, not unlike a coral reef.”Head over to the IGERT website to learn more about this fascinating reasearch and visit Scribol and Colossal for additional images.[via Scribol and Colossal] -- source link