NEW BEAUTIFUL FREEZE DISCOVERIES
Within the past month, there has been a remarkable crop of new discoveries in the deepest of freezes. They are monumental in one form or another -- biologically, geologically, and astronomically. And all are astonishingly beautiful.
SEA ANEMONE
A beautiful discovery has been made beneath a deep beautiful freeze, under Antarctica’s Ross Sea. A new species of sea anemone has been identified as reported in a recently published in study in the journal PLOS ONE.
This delicate-looking creature, dubbed Edwardsiella andrillae, lives upside down, dug into the bottom of the sea ice.
Image: Courtesy of PLOS One.
The study authors, led by Ohio State's Marymegan Daly, claim that the new species is the first anemone found to live in sea ice vs. rocks or reefs. It was discovered by accident during a test of a remote operated vehicle (ROV). At first, images transmitted from the ROV camera, were thought to be “fuzzy ice.” But upon closer inspection, tentacles became visible.
Photo: Courtesy of National Geographic.
The opaque anemones have an orange glow and range from 0.63 to 0.79 inches (16 to 20 millimeters) in length.
Photo: Courtesy of Universe Today.
NEW GREENLAND GRAND CANYON
An amazing new Grand Canyon has recently been discovered underneath Greenland’s ice sheet. Airborne radar data, collected by NASA's Operation IceBridge and other Arctic surveys, have revealed what is now earth’s longest canyon, stretching over 460 miles. It may actually be much longer -- but scientists haven’t been able to map the whole thing yet.
Image: Courtesy of University of Bristol. Rendering of the Greenland “Grand Canyon.”
The canyon is up to 2,600 feet (800 meters) deep and 6 miles (10 km) wide, similar to America's Grand Canyon, with distinctive V-shaped walls and a flat bottom, likely carved out by water vs. ice. Scientist suspect that the canyon channels ice meltwater to the surrounding oceans, which might explain the why there are no lakes under Greenland's interior ice sheet.
The canyon formed before Greenland’s Ice Age began, almost 2 million years ago.
Image: Courtesy of Talking Points Memo. Greenland Ice Sheet.
The Greenland Grand Canyon drains into Petermann Glacier, and likely has contributed to the glacier’s rapid retreat and its calving of two massive icebergs in the past three years, each bigger than Manhattan.
Image: Courtesy of IMCCE-Observatoire de Paris/CNRS/Y. Gominet, B. Carry. Artist’s rendition of water leaving Ceres.
CERES ICE VOLCANOES
Check out the newly discovered beautiful freeze of ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet Ceres (aka the largest asteroid in our solar system). Astronomers recently identified vapor plumes, erupting into space from volcano-like ice geysers on the planet’s surface.
Image: Courtesy of Nasa.
Using European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency, Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain and his team made the discovery. The study was detailed just last week in the journal Nature. "This is the first clear-cut detection of water on Ceres and in the asteroid belt in general," said Küppers.
Scientists have suspected that there is a substantial amount of water on Ceres for about 30 years. Now, Küppers and his colleagues have confirmed the finding.
The research has implications for how Ceres formed 4.6 billion years ago, and supports models that suggest the planets moved around a lot within the solar system during its formation, Küppers told SPACE.com.
Image: Courtesy of Space.
One theory is that these plumes are caused by icy volcanoes that eject water vapor instead of molten rock, similar to the ice geysers on Enceladus, Saturn’s moon. Another is that ice near the surface of Ceres changes state from a solid to a gas directly, in a process called sublimation, never becoming a liquid in-between, similar to the way comets do.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, will be orbiting around Ceres in early 2015, and hopefully can shed more light on these frozen phenomenon.
The findings also suggest that asteroids may have delivered some of the water in Earth's oceans.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Frozen Lake Erie.
FROZEN LAKE ERIE
While this is not a new discovery, the Great Lakes have recently had the deepest freeze in 20 years, making them more beautiful than we’ve seen them in a long time.
Lake Erie is the iciest. Over 90% of the lake is covered with ice at least 6 inches thick. And the remaining 10% has large chunks of ice floating on the surface. You can see the beauty of this freeze as it was captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite on Thursday, January 9 (2014).
Appreciate it while you can. The latest super-freeze is an anomaly. Global warming is reducing the amount of ice in the Great Lakes, as it is doing in the rest of our planet according to research published in the Journal of Climate.
Image: Courtesy of Anthem Press.
GLACIAL SYSTEMS AND LANDFORMS: A VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE
If you’d like to go deeper into the freeze zone, you might enjoy “Glacial Systems and Landforms: A Virtual Interactive Experience,” by Ryan C. Bell. It is a new interactive guide that uses Google Earth and other satellite imagery to help us understand the patterns and processes found within glacial environments.
Anthem Press (2013)
Photo: Courtesy of Emacswiki. Icicles.
Read more about Beautiful Freeze, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact in our posts throughout this week,
Enter this week’s BN Competition. Our theme this week is Beautiful Freeze. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 02.02.14.
