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Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Frozen fluidity


We were curious about the patterns in the ice droplets that I showed in last night's post, so we went out to look for more examples.  The frozen droplets were no longer there, but Eric spotted some amazing shapes and patterns in very thin sheets of ice on tree trunks.

I couldn't pick just one photo, so here are several examples.



Some of the patterns reminded us of old window glass:



The patches of ice were very small most were only ~1-2 cm across.  The individual "cells" that you see in the images were much smaller than that, probably only ~2 mm across.  I captured these views with the microscope function on my point-and-shoot camera.  [I love that function!  It's like having a microscope in the field!]



Some of the cells contained very simple and regular patterns.  Others had very complex and chaotic patterns.  I'll show more of the latter tomorrow, but here's a hint of what's to come:


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