Tag Archives: sodium chloride

Want ripples on your icicles? University of Toronto scientists suggest adding salt

TORONTO, ON – Though it’s barely the beginning of autumn, scientists at the University of Toronto are one step closer to explaining why winter’s icicles form with Michelin Man-like ripples on their elongated shapes.

Experimental physicist Stephen Morris and PhD candidate Antony Szu-Han Chen were spurred to investigate by the ripples that appear around the circumference of icicles that occur naturally.  It has been theorized that the ripples are the result of surface tension effects in the thin water film that flows over the ice as it forms. Their investigation revealed that the actual culprit is salt. (more…)

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A Window into Europa’s Ocean Right at the Surface

If you could lick the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. A new paper by Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and Kevin Hand from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, details the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa’s frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.

The finding, based on some of the best data of its kind since NASA’s Galileo mission (1989 to 2003) to study Jupiter and its moons, suggests there is a chemical exchange between the ocean and surface, making the ocean a richer chemical environment. The work is described in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. (more…)

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