All Heart

Ice. (ice baby...)

It's actually pretty interesting. So! This will be fun facts of water and ice. More small talk conversational material.

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Why do lakes smell worse in the fall? Because water is most dense at 4C. (39F for you english people) When the temperature of the ambient air approaches that temperature, the water from the bottom rises to the top since it has been storing all of the summer heat and is above 4C. This is known as lake turnover. And the smell is everything being brought up from the anaerobic conditions at the base of the lake.

This is also why lakes freeze from the top down. The water at the bottom is warmer than 0C.

When water freezes, it forms a hexagonal close packed structure. See the image at the right. All of those black dots are water molecules, and the whole hexagon is an ice crystal. Ice likes to grow out of the vertical faces of that molecule. They don't have to be oriented vertically, but in the image, they are. When it forms off of one face, its a grain of ice. A ton of grains put together is called columnar ice.

Other types of ice:
Granular ice forms from freezing slush, creating porous ice.
Frazil ice forms in rivers that have supercooled below freezing. Ice crystals form erratically in the water, float to the top, then clump together to form sheets of ice.
The supercooled condition creates an environment for ice to form on the riverbed. Yes, freeze at the bottom of the river. This has been known to cause rocks to float when a large amount of ice is formed on the rock face.

Why all the ice?
For starters, its being taught in Arctic Engineering. And theres a bunch ice floating down the Chena. I went and stood by the river to watch. Its rather relaxing just watching it all go by. You can hear all the ice absorbing water as it goes by. It sounds like thousands of those wooden wind chimes. Pretty cool.
The picture above had a cool phenomena going on. That black line is a tree stuck on shore and the river is flowing from left to right. The ice behind the tree is being drawn/trapped there by the eddy that the tree is creating, causing the ice to flow up river behind it.
Also see the columnar ice.

What has become of my computer dilema?
Well, my computer has been reduced to the hard drive. It's all heart now. Though, it will be much cheaper than expected to fix it, so it might be resurrected after all.
My saving grace in this troubling time was family in Anchorage and ENSTAR! My mom went and bought me a macbook air. It's slick, small, light as a feather, and super quiet. Plus one battery charge lasts me about two and a half days. Thats sporadic usage, but still impressive.
ENSTAR gave me a computer in the fall, and without it, I wouldn't be able to continue my reports because that machine has Word and Excel.

Pressure. Pushing down on me...

I can hear the champion whirring.