by Various
Each one of the many forms of water ice has its own geometry and each has been given its own number. What type of ice forms from water depends on temperature, pressure, the rate of cooling, and radiation it receives.
Other than ice Ih, the only form of ice you'll find on Earth is ice Ic (pronounced "ice one c"). The c stands for cubic, because water molecules come together with cubic symmetry in this form. Ice Ic forms in cold high altitude clouds at temperatures between -140 and -50 °C. When ice Ic falls to lower warmer regions, it turns to ice Ih.
Many of the other kinds of water ice require extreme pressures to form. Ice III or ice 3 forms at a pressure of 3000 atmospheres and at temperatures below -23 °C (250 K or -10 °F) . That's not a pressure you're going to find on Earth—not even in the deepest part of the ocean (the Marianas Trench in the Pacific). Given the temperature and pressure requirements, this type of ice will never be found on the outside surface of a moon or planet. The most likely place to find it is inside one of the ice worlds in our solar system—like Callisto, a moon of Jupiter.
Ice III is denser than liquid water. If it formed in a planet's ocean, it would immediately sink to the bottom. This means there could be liquid water sandwiched between two layers of ice—ice I at the surface and ice III at the bottom.
There are also forms of ice that are not crystalline. Instead, these forms of solid water are amorphous—the molecules don't form a regular geometric pattern. To make amorphous ice, the water must cool so quickly that the molecules do not have time to move around and find their place in a crystal. To make amorphous ice, you have to cool the water at a rate of 100,000 degrees Celcius per second down to a temperature below 136 K (-137 °C).
Amorphous ice is biologically useful. When water in a cell freezes slowly, it can form sharp crystals that can puncture the cell wall, killing the cell. However, amorphous ice does not form crystal spikes. If you want to preserve cells by freezing them, a technique known as cryopreservation, amorphous ice freezing techniques are the way to go.
That's how people "bank" human sperm—creating amorphous ice by adding compounds that lower the freezing point of water and by carefully controlling the rate of cooling. It's relatively easy to freeze a sperm cell. It's tiny and can be cooled rapidly. Large and complex collections of cells—like a functioning human brain, for instance—present a significantly greater challenge.
Amorphous ice doesn't naturally form on Earth, but it may well be the most common form of ice in the universe. Water molecules striking cold grains of dust in the vacuum of space can make amorphous ice, freezing into a random position wherever they hit the dust. So the geysers from Enceladus's cryovolcanoes are adding to the Solar System's supply of amorphous ice.
Amorphous ice can also form when crystalline ice is blasted with radiation that knocks water molecules out of their positions in the crystal. The Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) on the Galileo spacecraft detected varying amounts of amorphous ice on the moons of Jupiter. Europa and Ganymede orbit in a heavily irradiated region around Jupiter and have more amorphous ice than Callisto, which orbits outside Jupiter's radiation belts.
Here on Earth, you can make amorphous ice by spraying tiny drops of water into liquid propane cooled to 80 K (-193 °C). But if you manage to make some, you need to keep it cold. If amorphous ice reaches a temperature above 136 K (-137 °C), the water molecules jiggle about enough to vibrate into a crystalline form. Give those polar molecules half a chance and they'll snap into a configuration that brings the positive bits closer to the negative bits.
A WORLD OF EXPERIMENTS
Most of us aren't equipped to make our own amorphous ice. But that doesn't mean you can't do some experimenting with ice. Paul likes to create his own ice world by filling a balloon with water and putting it into the freezer for twenty-four hours or longer.
Once you have a balloon that's frozen solid, Paul has a few experiments to suggest. First, take the balloon out of the freezer and measure the temperature of the surface by touching a thermometer to it. You'll find it is colder than 0 °C—often as cold as -18 °C or 0 °F.
Now you can experiment with the real world equivalent of Vonnegut's ice 9. Using an eyedropper, put six small drops of water on the surface of the balloon. Watch them and you will eventually see one or two of the drops freeze solid. Once a couple of drops have frozen, you are ready to crystallize those unfrozen drops. Just touch them with a bit of frost from the freezer or a chip of ice with a dry surface.
That unfrozen drop will turn solid almost instantly. In this experiment you made supercooled water—water that is colder than the freezing point, 0 °C. If supercooled water comes in contact with solid ice, the ice can initiate crystallization in the water just like the ice 9 did in Cat's Cradle.
Why does this happen? Because it is hard for an ice crystal to get started in liquid water. When water molecules come in contact with the polar surface of a pre-existing ice crystal the crystal will help line the molecules up so they can snap into position.
Water ice isn't the only thing that can serve as a seed crystal. In cloud seeding, small particles of silver iodide are released into cold moist air to seed the formation of ice crystals. These crystals, once started, can grow large enough to fall. They become raindrops when they melt. (And for those of you who wonder where science fiction writers get our ideas, here's an interesting aside. Kurt Vonnegut's brother Bernard was an expert at cloud seeding and discovered that silver iodide crystals could be used to induce ice crystal formation in clouds. Coincidence? We don't think so.)
If you want to experiment with the super cool but don't have the patience to wait for a water balloon to freeze, Paul offers an alternate method. Stretch plastic wrap over the mouth of a plastic tumbler. Use an eyedropper to put 6 drops of water (each about the size of a small pea) on the plastic wrap. Place the tumbler and drops into the freezer.
Every few minutes, check on the drops. You want to catch the moment when one or more have frozen solid, but the rest are still liquid. The water in those liquid drops is supercooled. Touch them with an icicle or bit of frost and watch them instantly harden.
If you are the patient sort and have a frozen water balloon, Paul offers some other experiments to try. Cut and remove the balloon material. While the ice is still colder than 0 °C, use an eyedropper to place drops of water on top of the ice balloon. Because these drops are in contact with the crystalline ice, they will not supercool. But they will freeze into ice bumps. This is what happens on Earth during "freezing rain," rain that falls when surface temperatures are below freezing. Unlike sleet or hail, the raindrops are supercooled water. They crystallize into ice as soon as they hit a surface, like a road or a tree or a power line.
You can also take a look at the ice that's inside your miniature ice world. If a coating of opaque white frost prevents you from seeing inside, just wait until the surface reaches 0 °C. The frost will melt, giving you a clear view.
If you want to speed the process, put your ice balloon in a tank or bucket or bathtub of water. Let it float, and you'll see that most of the ice is beneath the water. In fact 91 percent of the ice ball is underwater. Most people are surprised by just how large a fraction of the ice balloon (or an iceberg) is underwater. (The passengers on the Titanic certainly were surprised.) As a bonus, putting the ice into water melts the frost on the outside.
As you look inside, you will see clear ice on the outside of the balloon and air bubbles inside. As ice freezes, it forms a crystal structure that is made of nearly pure water. Impurities in the water—like the dissolved air that's in tap water—do not get included in the ice. As the water freezes from outside of the balloon in, the dissolved air is squeezed out of the ice into the remaining liquid water in the center of the ice balloon.
Eventually the water inside becomes saturated with air and bubbles begin to form. Once one bubble forms, it seeds the growth of more bubbles. Often you can see lines of bubbles that formed along a radial line pointing toward the center of th
e balloon as the water froze from the outside-in.
BUT WHAT ABOUT ICE 9?
In 1968, five years after Kurt Vonnegut published Cat's Cradle, scientists discovered a type of water ice that they named ice 9—or actually ice IX. (Scientists prefer Roman numerals to designate different types of ice.) If you want to make ice IX, you need to start with ice III, which will require pressures over 200 million pascals (2000 atmospheres of pressure). Once you have ice III, cool it rapidly to below 140 K, and keep it there. Ice IX has a melting point near 140 K (-133 °C), so it doesn't present the danger of global freezing. And we're grateful for that.
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Paul Doherty works at The Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception—where science and science fiction meet. For more on Paul's work and his latest adventures, visit www.exo.net/~pauld. Pat Murphy is a science educator, a science fiction writer, and occasionally a troublemaker. She works at Mystery Science, developing hands-on lessons for elementary school. You can learn more about what she's up to at www.brazenhussies.net/Murphy.
* * *
PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS
By Paul Di Filippo | 1391 words
The London-Ehrenreich School of Applied Textual Fortitude
AS instructed, I appeared for my first day of classes at the London-Ehrenreich School of Applied Textual Fortitude dressed in the manner that the school's preparatory materials had dictated.
I wore a pair of sturdy workboots, brown Carhartt overalls, and a denim shirt. I wasn't quite sure why this uniform had been selected, but I was desperate enough to comply.
My entire adult life to the present day, it seemed, had been spent inside one classroom or another, all to no real profit or fulfillment of my overriding dream.
I had worked incredibly hard in my mediocre high school to qualify for entrance to the Ivy League, and succeeded. My postgrad degree was an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins. I had taken several online writing workshops with highly regarded instructors thereafter. Somewhere in that academic hurlyburly I had even managed to snag an intern's position one summer at The New Yorker. All of this activity with the sole goal of becoming a published novelist, the high-minded literary career I had longed for since adolescence.
And where was I, at age thirty-one? Back living with my folks, buried under a mountain of student debt and facing a stack of rejection letters as high as a wind turbine, with the partial manuscript of my fourth unsold novel gathering dust, because I was too disheartened to continue.
Naturally, when I had encountered the publicity for the LESATF, full of authentic testimonials from recent bestselling authors, everyone praising the school to the skies and attributing all their success to it, I jumped at the chance to enroll, taking out one last loan for the modest ten thousand dollar tuition cost. This would be my final attempt to learn the secrets and skills of a real novelist.
I stepped into a small office and looked about curiously. Two framed photos hung on one wall, headshots of a man and a woman, neither of whom I recognized. The man was handsome in a rough-hewn, retro way, the woman rather modern and dowdy.
There were no other exits that could possibly lead to classrooms or an auditorium, conference space or library, studios or Dean's quarters. But the school's brochure had promised "No online components!" I couldn't figure out how the teaching was supposed to happen. Had I been rooked? My check had already been cashed.…
The fellow sitting at the lone spartan desk, fortyish, trim, and vibrant, looked up at me with a confident and piercing gaze. I felt inexplicably reassured by his assured and intimate vibe. He stood and thrust forward his hand to shake.
"Mr. Funderbunk, I am glad to see you show up on time, and dressed in the proper attire to continue your education. We'll get you started right away. But first, the barest of lectures.
"I have read the manuscripts you sent us as your qualifying submissions. As is the case with all of the disciples we take on, they exhibit two essential qualities which perfectly fit you for our unique course. An utter mastery of sentence by sentence construction—"
I grinned broadly and stood taller at that praise, although I had heard similar words before, from professors and TAs and my workshop peers.
"—and absolutely nothing to say or any grasp of real life. To put matters plainly, you are a perfect modern millennial product of the MFA system, and this is why you have been unable to convince anyone to publish you, and why you will remain unpublished forever unless you acquire some fundamental understanding of how the world works and the ability to peer sympathetically into the hearts and minds of myriad types of people outside your normal sphere of activities. Now, take this piece of paper to the address thereon, and I will see you again in six weeks' time."
To say I was poleaxed would be the understatement of the century. I mindlessly accepted the invoice, and then managed to summon up enough wits to ask one instinctive question that must have seemed an utter non sequitur.
"Who—who are those two people in the portraits?"
"Those are the spiritual gurus and namesakes of our school, Jack London and Barbara Ehrenreich. I suggest you consider their biographies when you get a moment free from the rest of your, ah, 'studies.'"
With that, the head of the LESATF (whose name I still did not know, I realized) swiveled his chair away from me, and so I left.
The address on the paper was a cargo firm on the city's waterfront. There I reported to one Hernan Portillo, approximately six foot two and with arms big as sequoias.
"Okay, kid, just pay attention and try to learn quick, and you'll do okay. Now, follow me. These sonsabitchin' ships ain't gonna unload themselves."
Did you know that not every cargo ship nowadays is a highly mechanized container vessel? There's still a lot of manual labor involved with the smaller ships. Here were a few of my official duties.
"Tie/untie incoming/departing vessels to moorings. Hook up shore power, phone lines and install/adjust/remove gangway as needed. Deploy/retract oil boom around vessels as needed. Monitor tidal fluctuation and make or report the need to make necessary line adjustments accordingly. Open containers and inspect and sort cargo, if applicable, before loading and unloading. Load and unload materials or garbage onto or from pallets, trays, racks, and shelves by hand and keep dock free of debris (cardboard, pallets, and garbage). Load and unload ship cargo, using winches and other hoisting devices.…"
There was a lot more than that, but you get the picture.
That first night I went home, fell asleep with my face in a plate of my mother's corned beef and cabbage, then shuffled off to bed like a zombie before getting up at five A.M., bone-weary, to do it all over again.
At the end of six weeks, I had learned incredible amounts about the underpinnings of modern commerce, developed biceps almost as big as Hernan's, attended afterhours weddings of co-workers from six different ethnic backgrounds, and cultivated a scatalogical vocabulary second to none. The crew at the docks gave me a drunken farewell party on my last night, and the next day I reported back to the LESATF office.
When I entered, I immediately said, "Jack London worked for the Fish Patrol, as an oyster pirate, in a salmon cannery, and as an able-bodied seaman. He became a hobo, was thrown into jail, then joined the Yukon Gold Rush, all before he was twenty years old. Then he started to write. As for Barbara Ehrenreich, before writing Nickel and Dimed, she worked as a minimum-wage waitress and a maid to understand her topic."
The head of the school nodded approvingly, then said, "Very good. But don't get smart, kid, you still got a lot to learn."
He handed me a new assignment, and I left.
Over the next year I worked as an EMT, a crossing guard, a tour bus guide, a crematorium operator, a swimming pool installer, administrative assistant to a city councilman, a garbage truck driver, a short order cook at a roadside rest stop, a carpenter, a grocery bagger, a chicken de-beaker, a cabana boy, and a dozen other highly heterogenous jobs.
&n
bsp; After the last assignment, I returned to LESATF a changed man. The scales had fallen from my eyes, and, like the Grinch, my heart had grown two sizes.
The mysterious head of the school regarded me with an assessing eye, then said, "You've graduated. Here's your tuition back, with interest. Consider it a grant to support your new writing."
I looked with bafflement at the check. "But, but—"
"Don't sweat it. We make plenty off commissions as an employment agency."
I folded the check and pocketed it. "I just want to say thank you. But I do have one little problem."
"Oh? What's that?"
"Now, mimetic fiction looks pointless to me. I want to write something speculative and important, like science fiction."
"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you're going to need further training then."
The man picked up his smart phone. "Hello? Mr. Qfwfq? Could I see you here now, please?"
A whirlpool portal suddenly opened up in midair and out of it stepped a gnomish man with a slight green tinge to his skin.
"Mr. Qfwfq, we have here a budding science fiction writer. What would you suggest as his first assignment?"
The elderly sprite studied me up and down, then snapped his fingers and said, "The droid-repair factory on Mizar Five has an opening. Yes, I think that will do splendidly!"
* * *
COMING ATTRACTIONS
By C.C. Finlay and Gordon Van Gelder | 204 words
"THE THING ON THE SHELF" was a sneak preview of our next issue, which celebrates the works of David Gerrold. September marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, a series for which the young Gerrold wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles." That would be a landmark moment in most careers, but for Gerrold it was just a launching point. He went on to invent the Sleestaks for Land of the Lost, created The War Against the Chtorr and Star Wolf series, and wrote a host of other screenplays, novels, and stories, including "The Martian Child," which first appeared in this magazine, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker Awards along the way. In our September/October issue, we bring you not one, but two new David Gerrold novellas, a short memoir, and an essay about Gerrold by former F&SF editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch. And if that's not enough for you, we'll also include brand new stories by Peter Beagle, Leah Cypess, Lisa Mason, and Geoff Ryman, plus some surprises. It's our first Special Author issue since 2007 and we think you're going to like it.