Cooling things down

Yesterday was the first day of summer, and for us in Portland, it was only the second time this year when the thermometer reached 80. Having grown up in England, one of the jokes there was that if you get three nice days in a row, then that was summer. I hope that doesn’t extend to Portland as well this year. When I was thinking about a subject for my blog today, I decided to cool things down a little and chose the topic of ice.

Ice is fascinating and I am sure you could spend a lifetime studying the ways in which water turns into its solid form. It also has the strange property of being less dense than its liquid form which is highly uncommon. This means that things freeze from the top down rather than the bottom up. Can you imagine the differences if icebergs sank? Freezing can also happen at many different temperatures and under different types of conditions goes through the transition in several stages. It can form into crystalline structures, balls, snowflakes with a myriad of shapes – quite frankly it is just one of the most fascinating things.

Most of these pictures were taken at various places along the Columbia Gorge in 2009 and so they almost all show ice formation in moving water.

Brought to you by Brian Bailey

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