New Ice Structure Could Help Seed Clouds, Cause Rain

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."

Comments

Ice 9?

[Tau Neutrino]

Holy Bokonon! It's the end of the world!

Re:Ice 9?

[overThruster]

About 20 years ago when I was a freshman an the State University of New York at Albany, I had the good fortune to meet Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's brother. After talking to him a bit, the light went on in my head and I realized he must have been the inspiration for Kurt's ideas about ice-9!

Bernard Vonnegut was a brilliant atmospheric scientist who invented the process of cloud seeding with silver iodide crystals. Despite his achievements, he was a kind gentleman who was more than happy to take the time to talk to a curious freshman about his work. We had several fascinating conversations and he even gave me reprints of his original journal articles on cloud seeding. I learned a lot from him and was inspired by his example.

ice9

[Tei]

A science fiction history about ice that is stable at room temperatura, so iceize the adjacent water. Causing the apocalipsys wen one piece of ice9 accidentally touch the sea.

Re:ice9

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I seem to remember there was an Outer Limits episode with a similar plot as well. Some kind of artificial structure that caused water to freeze at 45 degrees and melt somewhere around 80, so the world was immediately plunged into an ice age.

Creepy if you have read Cat's Cradle

[erik.martino]

I can see on the tags that I am not the only one who thought so

Re:Creepy if you have read Cat's Cradle

[Dynamoo]

Indeed. Perhaps Vonnegut should be compulsory reading for all aspiring scientists who might accidentally destroy all life of earth.

Re:Creepy if you have read Cat's Cradle

[zappepcs]

I just wanted perpetual crown on the rocks and I accidentally the whole planet.

Re:Creepy if you have read Cat's Cradle

[Wumpus]

Go read it.

Re:Creepy if you have read Cat's Cradle

[Guppy]

I just wanted perpetual crown on the rocks and I accidentally the whole planet.

I see what you there.

Pentagons? THAT'S your big solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet russia, the pentagon snows on YOU.

FTFA - "Snow is made of hexagons. We changed it up and used fucking PENTAGONS."

Won't someone think of the children who on the way to school will be pelted
with snowballs of an ever increasing diameter?

I'm off to make fire hotter using a goddamn nano-rhombus. Donations for science anyone?

Bad titles on /. and original articles

[Camann]

Maybe I just don't understand the subject enough but from TFA "... there is no a priori rule that hexagons should form... and when people are searching for new ice nucleating agents which can be used to seed clouds and cause rain, they do not necessarily need to focus on materials that have hexagonal surfaces - other types of surfaces may be good too."

Nowhere do I see a claim that this pentagonal structure is superior, just that this opens up the potential that there are other structures as well and that one yet undiscovered structure could be beneficial for cloud seeding.

Ice Ice Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another form of Ice to add the existing 16-odd arrangements.

Heh, I am surprised at the headline

[NotQuiteReal]

Shouldn't it have been:

Pentagon may control weather!

Cat's Cradle or Earthsea?

[__aaqxjh2299]

Perhaps it isn't Vonnegut so much as Ursula LeGuin we should look to here. You can't cast a light without creating a shadow. Do we know that creating rain somewhere will not cause drought elsewhere?

Science Daily...reporting?

[TimmyDee]

I think to say that Science Daily does any reporting is stretching the definition of reporting a bit much. I think "rewritten from a press release" is more like it.

If you want a real news piece, with real reporting, check out the article on the same paper over at New Scientist. They actually talked with the scientist involved in the study (and one that wasn't).

Re:Pentagons?!

[Camann]

pentagon != pentagram

OT ... but can't resist

[hany]

Please, just do not let it drop into the river, lake or ocean!!!

Quite dumb-proof, isn't it? :)

_____________

Btw, its ice-nine by Kurt Vonegut if anybody is wondering.

Re:OT ... but can't resist

[hoojus]

Frozen to death despite living in a dessert.

Only if the dessert was ice cream. If it were a hot apple pie they would hardly be frozen.

Curious

[camperdave]

initiallty. However ice would reflect light, cooling the earth...

As I look out at the ugly piles of black, dirt encrusted ice, I have to wonder: If white reflects heat, and black absorbs it, why is it that the big piles of white snow are long since melted away, and the big piles of dirty black snow are still here?

Re:Curious

[frogzilla]

As snow melts any crud that is on the surface or embedded in the pile collects and makes the surface darker as the pile gets smaller. The clean snow piles that you observed melting more quickly weren't as large or were less dense than the dirty snow piles. I suspect that you probably didn't perform careful observations (as no reasonable, casual observer would) and that if you did you'd soon see that it all makes sense. Also I think you'd find it very difficult to find a clean snow pile in an urban environment. Maybe behind an arena? Even then airborne matter would accumulate on the surface. This happens just about anywhere that snow sits for a long time.

Re:Curious

[codemaster2b]

heat is light, more or less

Re:Curious

[ByOhTek]

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.

Don't worry

[PPH]

We've fixed it. Its Ice 9.1 now.

Re:Global warming ...

[Simply Curious]

We need to realize that we are shaping nearly-infinitely complex systems, whether we want to or not. Then we can learn to understand them so that we can create intended consequences.

5-sided snowflakes

[The Iso]

If the ice crystals are pentagonal, they will form pentagonal snowflakes. This will give us a better chance of finding the snowflake with magic properties depicted on page 00062 of the Principia Discordia.