Scientists Have Discovered Why Stones Can Balance On Fragile Ice Pedestals
Image via ID 110397600 © Silivonochka | Dreamstime.com
Japanese Zen gardens and the Lake Baikal in Siberia have something in common, and that is the prevalence of small rocks managing to balance.
In Zen gardens, stones are most often atop each other. At Lake Baikal, though, the rock stays perfectly still on a thin pillar of ice. Fittingly, this is called the Baikal Zen formation.
It’s one of those things that is a little strange, but you’d just kind of accept and go on your day. It’s usually believed that these are formed when the rock catches light and heat from the Sun, which melts the ice underneath to form the peculiar shape. Then, at night, the water refreezes. And so on.
New research, however, has suggested that this phenomenon has nothing to do with heat. Instead, it points toward the concept of sublimination, where ice evaporates straight into vapor without ever having passed by the phase of being water.
In this context, the shade provided by the stone prevents sublimination from happening near it. Instead, the ice further away from it goes through sublimination at a faster pace.
The temperatures of Lake Baikal are to thank for this strange occurrence. “Weather records show that melting of the ice is virtually impossible and that, instead, the weather conditions (wind, temperature, and relative humidity) favor sublimation, which has long been known to be characteristic of the Lake Baikal area,” the researchers write in their paper.
To test this, they attempted to reproduce this in their lab. Instead of stones, aluminum and copper disks were used, placed on top of ice blocks in a commercial lyophilizer, which is essentially machinery built for sublimination.
Both of these produced the Baikal Zen formation, despite the fact that copper is almost twice as good at conducting heat as aluminum is. This means that, unlike what was previously believed, thermal properties aren’t really a deciding factor in this phenomenon.
After undergoing numerical modeling simulations, these findings were further confirmed, adding more credibility to the theory.
“Far from the stone, the sublimation rate is governed by the diffuse sunlight, while in its vicinity the shade it creates inhibits the sublimation process,” the team states.
The stone is depicted as an umbrella, providing enough shade to prevent sublimination. While this protects the ice underneath, it also leads to the formation of the pedestal.
[via Ars Technica, image via ID 110397600 © Silivonochka | Dreamstime.com]
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