New Ice Structure Could Help Seed Clouds, Cause Rain 100
ScienceDaily is reporting that a new ice chain structure may provide a better method for seeding clouds and causing rain. "Ice structures are usually built out of simple hexagonal arrangements of water molecules and this hexagonal building block motif is easily observed in the structures of snowflakes. However, during their studies Dr Angelos Michaelides and co-workers from the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, and the University of Liverpool have discovered a natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons."
Re:ice9 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ice9 (Score:2, Interesting)
initiallty. However ice would reflect light, cooling the earth...
But at 40F, it'd melt again, allowing the earth to heat up, and freeze again.
The balance would end up with either the earth just plain freezing (most likely) or hovering between 32F and 40F in the areas that previously wouldn't have been frozen.
It wouldn't be a warm ice age.
Re:Curious (Score:4, Interesting)
because it isn't snow, it's ice (well, snow is ice, but ice with a lot of air in it.
First off, that black ice? it's shiny. You flash light on it, it reflects it back, it doesn't scatter it. At the right angle, it's bright because you see the shine, but at off angles, you don't get the scatter - so it's still reflecting more light (reducing heat input), though probably not as much as snow.
Which comes to why it is still around. If you freeze a pool of water (or a trickle of water), it become ice, not snow, because it didn't have a high air content while freezing. Snow is created in the atmosphere where there is much more non-water-vapor than water-vapor in the air.
Most of that ice is re-frozen snow (it melts, and sinks, as it sinks, it gets to cooler areas and re-freezes, maybe the sun goes down, and heat input goes down, so it the stuff that was exposed and warming refreezes as well.