Evening Star Newspaper, February 2, 1930, Page 100

18 | — THE "%U’\IDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 2, 1930. Now Th BY CHARLES FITZHUGH TALMAN. OW is the season when meteorolo- gists are kept busy answering questions about the less familiar forms of snow and ice. Their name is legion. Fro%en water is one of the most protean substances in nature. Every feathery cloud is made of it. Every snowflake is an ice crystal or a cluster of such crystals, and the shapes of these tiny gems are infinitely varied. No two specimens of ice on our windowpanes are exactly alike in pat- tern. Hailstones show a remarkable diversity of architecture. Even the larger aggregates of ice and snow exhibit an immense variety of typical forms. Early this Winter came tidings from Alaska. The streams in that territory were, it was said, reversing the usual order of procedure and freezing from the bottom up instead of from Whe top down! ‘Who discovered this mare’s nest I am unable to say, but the tale was so widely broadcast that my mail was burdened with appeals for an explanation. What actually happened was nothimg new, strange or unusual. The forma- tion of ice at the bottom of streams when the water above is unfrozen is a process with which science is well acquainted, though, for obvious reasons, the existence of ice so located is not usually noticed by the casual observer. Ice thus formed at the bottom of a body of water is called “anchor ice.” In temperate latitudes its formation is due to the cooling of the bed of the stream by rapid radiation of heat through the water. It forms only at night and under a clear sky. Anything overhanging the water—such as a bridge, for example— checks this heat loss and prevents the ice from forming. In high latitudes anchor ice may be pro- duced in another way. Where the soil below a certain depth is permanently frozen, as it is in a great part of Alaska, the bottom of a stream loses heat not merely by radiation to the sky above, but also by conduction to the ground below. Thus it may cool below the freezing point before the water does so at the surface, and the cold bottom will then cause ice to form next to it. Prof. Barnes of McGill University, has studied anchor ice for years in the River St. Lawrence. He tells us that a layer five feet thick may freeze in a single night. A slight rming of the water after sunrise detaches ice and permits it to rise to the surface, often bringing up big rocks from the bottom. Boats are sometimes surrounded and caught by these rising masses and are carried down into the rapids before they can be extricated. -, ANOTHER. prank of nature that arouses curiosity every Winter is the formation of vertical columns of needles of ice in moist gravely soil. Clusters of these columns may sometimes be seen on cold mornings on a patch of bare ground, uplifted to a height of an inch or more and often capped with small stones or particles of earth. The ice is pushed up by the “capillary” or wicklike action of the soil on its contained water and also by the expan- sion of the water in freezing. One of the rarest spectacles of cold weather is the “ice spine,” some examples of which have recently been described by Mr. F. E. Matthes of the United States Geological Sur- vey. In one case a tiny puddle of water had gathered in a shallow cavity drilled in rock at a quarry. With a drop in temperature a sheet of ice formed over the surface of the puddle and eventually the whole body of water turned to ice. As it was confined by the rock it could expand only in an upward direction but instead of the whole surface being lifted a small vertical spine of ice pushed up in the middle to a height of a couple of inches. On another occasion Mr. Matthes found a large number of such spines projecting from small frozen pools in cavities on a rocky mountain pe in the Yosemite Valley. In this case the were not vertical but were inclined at various angles. Walking through the woods on a frosty morning you may discover a clump of dead plant stems adorned with the strange append- ages known as “ice fringes.” The plant will probably be a specimen of dittany (Cunila origanoides), which, for some unknown reason, wears these ribbons far more frequently than does any other member of the vegetable king- dom. They consist of thin, curving sheets of ice about as thick as a knife blade, half an inch to two inches wide and sometimes six or seven inches long. One or more may form on a stem. Ice fringes have been investigated by several botanists and physicists, especially in recent years by Dr. Coblentz of the United States Bureau of Standards and Dr. Humphreys of the Weather Bureau, but their origin is still something of a mystery. The ice is not de- posited from the air, after the manner of hoar- frost, but is formed from water that rises from the soil through the dead stems. Each fringe begins as a row of separate hair-like crystals, which merge into a continuous ribbon as they grow outward. The cohesive character of moist snow, util- ized by the juvenile sculptor in the making of snow men, causes this substance to assume naturally a number of striking forms. Thus a strip of snow lying along a window ledge, a fence top or the branch of a tree will some- times slip down in the middle and hang in festoon fashion, supported only at the ends. This formation is called a “snow garland.” ®The delicate adjustment of temperature re- quired to produce this freak—involving first a slight melting of the snow and then prob- ably its refreezing—Is doubtless of rare occur- ance, and few of these garlands have been re- ported. One observed in Berlin some years ago was nearly four feet long and sagged 16 inches below a window ledge. HUGE overhanging caps of snow formed on tree stumps, posts and the like have been aptly named “snow mushrooms” by Mr. Vaughan Cornish, who has described their oc- currence in great numbers in the Selkirk Mountains of Western Canada. Still stranger »l at SNOW and ICE —3 Are Here . Streams That Freexe From the Bottom Up; Red Snow; Crystal “Smoke;” Mysterious Ice Fringes and Death-Dealing Ice Fogs, Are but a Few of the Strange Pranks of Old Man Winten Which Science Secks to Explain. The Gen. Grant statue after one of Washington's heaviest snowstorms. in appearance are the hummocky fields of snow or glacler ice found in many lofty regions, to which science applies the Spanish name “nieve penitente.” This name is shortened from the expression “nieve de los penitentes”—*snow of the penitents”—which was given to the re- markable examples of such snowfields seen in the high Andes of Argentina and Chile, where, at a distance, these formations bear a certain resemblance to throngs of white-robbed human being engaged in some religious ceremony. Just how these pinnacles of snow and ice as- sume their shape has been a subject of much controversy, though it is certain that the hot sunshine of high altitudes is the chief agency in producing them. This is evident from the fact that near the equator they stand nearly erect, while in higher latitudes they are inclined more or less in the average direction of the solar rays. Extensive tracts of nieve penitente may be seen on the glacier fields of Mount Rainler and elsewhere in the mountainous re- gions of the western United States. Cylindrical masses of snow sometimes make Pacific & Atlantic Photo. their appearance in great numbers of snow- covered fields and lawns and always arouse much interest, as they look more like the work of man than of nature. These masses are rolled by the wind and each is seen to lie at the end of a trough in the snow marking the patch along which the rolling has occured. They are called “snow rollers.” They are usually somewhat hollowed out at the ends so that they have the general shape of a lady's muff. Snow rollers have been known to form by the thousands in the course of a minute or two, and some have been found as big as bar- rels, though this size is exceptional. Each roller probably begins as a piece of caked sur- face of the snow, which is turned over by a gust of wind and then rolled along until it grows too heavy to be rolled any farther. RED snow is found chiefly in the polar re- glons and among the snowfields of high mountains, though it has occasionally been ob- served at low levels, Its occurance in the Alps The Capitol through a snow-covered frame. Photo by Harrls & Ewing, was described by De Saussure in the eighteenth century. In 1819 Sir John Ross discovered the Crimson Cliffs on the coast of Greenland, the dark red snow of which lay to a depth of a foot, with white snow beneath. Specimens of the melted snow that he brought home were found to owe their color to a minute organism to which the name Protococcus nivalis was given. It is now called Sphaerella nivalis. Several other lowly species of plant and animal life impart to snow different shades of red, as well as green and yellow. Patches of red snow are sometimes seen in the mountains of Washington and Oregon. In July, 1911, vast fields of it were found in the Yosemite National Park by members of the Sierra Club, one of whom, Dr. Ford A. Car- penter, took an excellent natural-color photo= graph, which was subsequently published. The snow looked as if carmine ink had been spilied over it. Elsewhere in the same region a white snowfield was seen to be reddened, as if with blood, wherever the hoofs of the pack mules broke through the crust. Apart from the various coloring -organisms, snow is known to have quite an extensive flora and fauna, Among its most remarkable in- habitants are the so-called “snow worms" that are sometimes found strewn by the millions over the snowfields and glaciers of high moun- tain regions. They dislike warm sunshine and burrow deep in the snow in the middle of the day. The ice storm is a beautiful and expensive variety of weather, which probably flourishes in greater perfection in North America than anywhere else in the world. The moisture in such storms falls as rain, but forms a coating of smooth, clear ice on terrestrial objects. This icy deposit is popularly called “sleet,” but the Weather Bureau prefers to call it ‘“glaze,” as “sleet” is a word of several meanings. Glaze deposits are often so light as to do no harm. In many cases, however, they cause enormous damage by breaking the limbs of trees and the wires and poles of the telegraph, telephone and power companies. In the great . New England ice storm of November, 1921, it was estimated that a tree of average size re- ceived an icy load amounting to 5 tons, About 100,000 trees were destroyed, and the wire-using industries suffered losses of millions of dollars. Another great ice storm, in Decem- ber, 1924, tore down 34,000 telephone poles in Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, putting enough mileage of wire out of commission to girdle the globe. Different in origin and appearance from glaze is “rime,” which is deposited by drifting fog, the droplets of which are at a temperature below the freezing point and turn instantly to ice on coming in contact with solid objects. Rime is rough and more or less feathery. As it is built up of fog particles driven by the wind, it grows out most rapidly on the windward side of exposed objects. Both glaze and rime are frequently deposited on aircraft in flight, but it appears from recent investigations that only the former is a serious source of danger, owing to its effect in changing the shapes of the wll;: and other parts so as to destroy the Rime should not be confounded with hoare frost, which usually consists of ice crystals Continued on Nineteenth Page