More Weird Ice Weather
It seems like we should understand water pretty well. All kinds of scientists have studied it. It covers most of the surface of the Earth. All life depends on it. And yet there is much we don't understand about how water behaves. Water is weird. We have continued to have freezing nights here in Seattle, and so have been able to observe some of water's weirdness in its solid state. Last week I wrote about the weirdness that is hair ice . Since then, we've had a chance to notice some other strange ice effects. Hiking on Cougar Mountain the other day, we saw hair ice again, but not nearly as much as at Squak Mountain last week. We also noticed our footsteps crunching on the trail. Sometimes the ground would even sink a centimeter or two beneath our feet. Some of the rocks in the trail also appeared to have burrowed down into the ground. This effect was actually due to the fact that water in the soil had frozen and lifted up the level of the soil's surface, leaving the ro...