Breeze Of Perfection
Growing perfect icicle
Growing a smooth cone of ice requires pure water and a breeze, while other conditions create bent or lumpy pieces of ice like these
A team of Canadian iciclologists has put to rest the notion that one frozen cone of drips is exactly the same as the next. By growing lots of icicles in controlled laboratory conditions, the scientists have uncovered evidence that runs counter to an earlier theory saying that all icicles should, by and large, assume the same uniform, platonic icicle shape. They posted their observations online August 11 at arXiv.org, with a supplementary series of videos on YouTube. Physicists Stephen Morris and Antony Szu-Han Chen of the University of Toronto set out to test the existing theory's prediction that most icicles should assume a conical shape. Break off one of these perfect icicles anywhere along its length, and the fragment will be the exact same shape as the whole thing. "As far as we know, no one has really systematically studied the shape of icicles and how they grow," Morris says. "Nobody has really tried to fill in the physics of how the shape emerges."
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