Location Taken: Lake Michigan, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
Did you know that ice is actually a rock?
Really, it is! A rock is defined as an aggregate of one or more minerals, and sure enough, ice is on the big list of minerals! So there’s no difference between a hunk of granite and a hunk of ice, right?
Well, sort of.
A large part of why “ice=rock” seems so odd to us is that we’re used to thinking of the water molecule as, well, water. And to us, ice is a form-shift of the liquid form. Plus, we tend to deal with ice right near the edge of its melting point. Things act a bit differently when they’re on the edge between stages, since the various form-shifts of periodic melting can cause all sorts of interesting crystallization and what not. And of course, our body temperature is above the melting point of ice, so when we pick it up to look at it, it starts shifting to the liquid water form. Imagine how odd it would be if you picked up a pebble and it just melted away in your hands. And yet, we take that sort of thing for granted with ice.
If we lived on a place where the primary liquid was, let’s say, methane (with all necessary biological shifts for surviving in such a place), ice would be just another rock. Perhaps an odd one, with its semi-transparency, but still, you could build your houses and aqueducts out of ice without any thought towards it melting. Well, not aqueducts, that means “water conduit” in its Latin roots. Hmmm… Methaneducts? That just sounds odd…
By the way, methane isn’t an arbitrary choice. One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has liquid methane on its surface, which acts a lot like our water in many ways, from methane lakes to methane rain. Well, our lakes have a much lower chance of catching fire, but hey, what’s life without excitement?
Now this picture has the odd aspect of looking like it’s a sandstone rock outcropping literally covered in ice, including fun icicles. But it’s the other way around. It’s an ice rock outcropping literally filled with sand! Though it still has fun icicles. That didn’t change.
