Incredible Frozen Waterfalls--Post 1

Yesterday I left Grand Marais mid-day to start heading toward my Arizona adventure. This is the 3rd of 4th trip in a row that I had a more leisurely approach to preparing for the trip. I must admit that this is an easier way to go about it, rather than working like a crazy lady to cram more work in before leaving.

I even had time in Munising to stop by some frozen waterfalls. First, I drove out Sand Point in Munising to see if I get get any photos of the ice cliffs on Grand Island.  Yep.  They are awesome.

This photo was taken looking back up Munising Bay.  Notice the two ice shanties as well as two lone fishermen sitting out on the ice.

Then I stopped at Munising Falls, located across from the hospital in Munising on Sand Point.

A map of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Frozen ice on the river...

The river....

And Munising Falls.  Normally this time of year the falls is much more massive.  The warm temperatures show..

What is a Snowflake?

A flake of snow is a feathery ice crystal, typically displaying delicate sixfold symmetry. Snowflakes and snow crystals are made of ice, and pretty much nothing more. A snow crystal is a single crystal of ice. A snowflake can mean an individual snow crystal, or a few snow crystals stuck together, or large agglomerations of snow crystals.

 

 

 

Snowflakes are not frozen raindrops. Sometimes raindrops do freeze as they fall, but this is called sleet. Sleet particles don't have any of the elaborate and symmetrical patterning found in snow crystals. Snow crystals form when water vapor condenses directly into ice, which happens in the clouds. The patterns emerge as the crystals grow.

 

Have you ever looked at a snowflake and wondered how it formed? Snowflakes are a particular form of water ice. Snowflakes form in clouds, which consist of water vapor. When the temperature is 32° F (0° C) or colder, water changes from its liquid form into ice. Several factors affect snowflake formation. Temperature, air currents, and humidity all influence shape and size. Dirt and dust particles can get mixed up in the water and affect crystal weight and durability. The dirt particles make the snowflake heavier, and can cause cracks and breaks in the crystal and make it easier to melt. Snowflake formation is a dynamic process. A snowflake may encounter many different environmental conditions, sometimes melting it, sometimes causing growth, always changing its structure.

 

In more detail, here is the story of a snowflake. Each flake of snow begins with water vapor in the air. Evaporation from oceans, lakes, rivers, transpiration from plants, and exhaling from animals. Even you, every time you exhale, put water vapor into the air.   When a mass of air is cooled, the water vapor it holds begins to condense. Right at the surface of the earth, water vapor condenses onto surfaces, such as dew on grass. In the atmosphere, water vapor condenses onto dust particles. A cloud is nothing more than a huge collection of water droplets hugging dust particles, all suspended above the earth.  As clouds gets colder, the droplets in the clouds start to freeze into minute ice crystals.   Liquid water vapor in the cloud then attaches to the ice crystal embryo in a continuous process causing the snowflake to grow.  

 

Common snowflake shapes include:

• Generally, six-sided hexagonal crystals are shaped in high clouds.
• Needles or flat six-sided crystals are shaped in middle height cloud. 
• A wide variety of six-sided shapes are formed in low clouds.  
• Colder temperatures produce snowflakes with sharper tips on the sides of the crystals and may lead to branching of the snowflake arms (dendrites).  
• Snowflakes that grow under warmer conditions grow more slowly, resulting in smoother, less intricate shapes.

Why are snowflakes symmetrical (same on all sides)?  Actually, not all snowflakes are symmetrical. Several things can distort the shape of a snowflake including uneven temperatures, dirt, and other factors But in most cases snowflakes form in an orderly and symmetrical manner. This is because when water freezes, the shape of the ice crystal reflects the internal order of the water molecules. When molecules freeze into the solid state, the bonds or connections between the water molecules are very weak. During crystallization, the water molecules align themselves to maximize these bonds as much as possible. Consequently, water molecules arrange themselves in a chemically predetermined manner that tends to maintain symmetry.

 

When we were kids we always heard that no two snowflakes are the same. This is not necessarily true. This may be true if you were able to examine each snowflake down to the exact number of water molecules, arrangement of electrons, etc. However, on the macro scale it is possible for two snowflakes to look alike. Over the history of the earth, it is also likely that duplicate snowflakes have been produced.

 

If water and ice are clear, then why does snow look white?  The main reason is that snowflakes have light-reflecting surfaces that scatter light into its component colors, so snow appears white. Another contributing factor is that there are tendencies in the way that that human eyesight works. The human brain compensates for a light source. Thus, even though sunlight is yellow and scattered light from snow is yellow, the brain automatically subtracts the yellow wavelengths causing you to see white.

Interesting Photos -- What are They?

Yesterday it was raining with temperatures in the mid 30s. In fact, it was raining hard. It condensed and partially melted the little bit of snow we have But then when I woke this morning, I looked out to a white out. From day to day this winter it is hard to tell what to expect.

So I did not get out since I refuse to go out in that type of weather. So for today's blog posting, I am including a series of interesting photos. Please check them out and guess what you think they are.   Some of the photos are not obvious, but the exercise of guessing will hopefully stimulate your thoughts.  At the end of this posting, included is information about what the pictures in fact represent.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4

Photo 5

Photo 6

Photo 7

Photo 8

Photo 9

Photo 10

Photo 11

Photo 12

Photo 13

Photo 14

All of the pictures were taken from the Science Channel's program called How The Universe Works.  The timing of the show was perfect for me since I have been working on my speech for the Celebration of Agates international show coming up the end of July in Minneapolis, MN.  My speech's title is:  The Story of Silica--Cosmic Source through Agate Genesis. 

Photo 1  Simulation of the beginning of an exploding supernova

Photo 2  A cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies, called a galactic filament. It is the
largest known structure in the universe.  Scientists have been mapping the known universe using specialized equipment to measure cosmic microwave background radiation.  They were surprised that all of the galaxies in the universe a connected in a filament arrangement. 

Photo 3  A simulation of the impact point of an early planet building collision.
 
Photo 4  An illustration of the earth's magnetic field.

Photo 5  A simulated picture of  a star that is five million times larger than our sun, which is nearly a million miles in diameter and 93,000,000 miles away from the earth.  You can fit a million earths inside our sun.  There are other stars that are even bigger.  The largest star ever discovered is VY Canis Majoris, which is a billion times larger than our sun.  It is located 4,900 light years away.

Photo 6  A nebula, which is left over star dust from the death of a large star that exploded in a supernova.

Photo 7  A simulation of what it looks like on the surface of our sun.

Photo 8  The active zone in a man-made fusion reactor   Scientists are simulating a star's energy source -- in a lab near Oxford, England -- to control the power of fusion.

Photo 9  A simulated picture of photons created in the fusion of hydrogen atoms.  These atoms naturally repel each other.  But if you heat them up, such as what happens in the core of a star, heat equals motion.  When the atoms move fast enough, they cannot avoid hitting each other and they hit and fuse to create a new element -- helium -- along with a small amount of pure energy released as photons.

Photo 10  A simulated picture showing photons escaping from the surface of the sun.  It takes thousands of years for photons to travel from the core of the sun to the surface.  It then just takes eight minutes for photons to travel from the surface of the sun to the earth.

Photo 11  A simulated picture showing the declining fusion in the center of a sun near the end of its life cycle.

Photo 12  When a small star, like our sun, uses up all its hydrogen in the fusion reactions, there is not enough outward pressure.  Gravity trying to get the star to contract will win the war against the fusion reactions that try to explode the star outward.  At first, gravity will  crush the star in on itself.  This contraction causes what is left in the star to heat up again, making it to expand outward.  When this happens to our sun between 5 and 7 billion years from now, our sun will swell up until it is 100 million miles in diameter and become a Red Giant.  But then the Red Giant will self destruct as the core becomes unstable.  Since there is no more hydrogen to use as fuel, the star will begin fusing helium to carbon as the star begins destroying itself from the inside out.  The massive explosions blast energy toward the surface blowing away the star's outer layers.  Slowly, the star will disintegrate.  All fusion reactions will stop.  All that remains is an intensely dense hot core that develops into a white dwarf no larger than the earth.  At the core of a white dwarf, scientists believe there would be a giant crystal of carbon, that may in fact be a big diamond.  The picture shows what this giant diamond may look like.

Photo 13  Larger stars have a different end to their life cycle than what occurs with smaller stars like our sun.  They have enough mass that when all the hydrogen is used up as fusion fuel, and then all the helium is used up to make carbon -- they continue smashing bigger and bigger atoms.  This photo simulates the progression of fusion fuel used by a star.  The last in the line is iron.  Once a star manufactures iron, that is the end of the line.  Iron cannot be used as a fusion fuel.

Photo 14  This last picture represents the moment of a supernova explosion when a large star disintegrates and basically turns itself inside out.  In the extreme heat and force of the explosion, heavier elements are forged and then projected into the universe.  It is this material from exploding supernovas that is recycled to make everything in the universe, including us.

Winter Weather -- Sort Of

Late last week and over the weekend we finally had a stretch of winter weather. The school was closed one day and in total we received several inches of snow. This morning, however, it is 30 degrees with freezing rain.

First a couple of shots of the white out.

Then the next day I had to snowshoe my trails to human groom them for cross country skiing.

For the second year in a row, not all the apples feel from the trees in the fall.

Usually this time of year the snow drift that forms on the south side of my house is usually up to my windows.  We are not there yet, but the storm late last week started the snow level to catch up a bit.

Drain the Great Lakes -- Post 3

Today I will post the remainder of the pictures from the National Geographic program called Drain the Great Lakes.

In the eastern part of Lake Ontario, scientists discovered something unusual.

To the south east of Charity Shoal, which is marked by a small lighthouse, there is a circular depression on the bottom of the lake bed.

Charity Shoal lighthouse....

When they examined the depression, they realized that it is almost identicle to the meteor crater in Arizona. 

So the scientists have tentatively concluded that the depression is in Lake Ontario is also a meteor crater.

The last segment of the program discussed the artifacts on the bottom of Lake Superior.  There are more than 6,000 different wrecks.

The most famous being the Edmund Fitzgerald that sank in 1975.