Take a look at this hidden universe...

Hi folks

 

I thought someone might be interested in seeing the pictures below.

They show a little piece of the relatively unaccessible world of a

polar ice cap: the first shot is a piece of an ice core drilled at

80 deg North as it looks on the field. Following, a thin section of

the same ice core as it appears on a light table in cross-polarised

light. The fancy colors make it now fairly easy to distinguish

individual ice cristals (due to different orientations of their

optical axis). Cheers..<div></div>

now in the cold lab...<div></div>

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Lovely images. Beauty can be found in most anything.

Quite lovely! I'm curious as to their magnifications?

Well, no magnification at all if you mean something like a microscope: the dark object you see in some of the pictures is a pen, as a scale reference. In other words: the real size of those crystal is between 3-4 mm and 2 cm across.

Andrea -=- Very interesting as well as facinating. How far back in time would this core represent?

I worked in biomedical photography for years, and often displayed things like enlarged microscope slide photos of diseased tissue cross-sections on my walls at my lab. Many were quite beautiful, in a grim sort of way. An erupting volcano or raging tornado can be beautiful, in spite of the damage and heartache it may wreak on people and property.

Lester, very smart question! How far back in time would this core represent? Not much, this one. Only a few years as it was not drilled to reconstruct climate history but for other "glaciological needs": the deepest core we drilled at the same site was about 20 m, which should ensure that we got the radioactive "Chernobil layer": once you have a layer of known age and you know its depth, it's easy to determine at least the average accumulation rate from that event to present (or to the next event)..

I worked in biochemistry lab for 2 years in College (UCR)and did microscope photography for one of the "rising star" professors - mainly of Human protein (DNA) crystals. Many of these were best illuminated under polarized light - the slides were fascinating.

 

I have several prints framed in my office as a reminder of the beauty of the "small world".

>>we got the radioactive "Chernobil layer"<<

 

OK, that's a pretty frightening concept... This is how many thousands of miles from that disaster?

 

Really cool images otherwise! Reminds me of the microscopic views of foraminiferans (in plankton), like tiny jewels...

These are wonderful... where do teh beautiful colours come from? Is that a result of the polarised light?

Andrew, we're talking about northern Svalbard: probably a couple of thousand miles away from the nuclear reactor, and yet the fallout is well measurable. What might be a bit weird, as well, is that glaciology and paleoclimatology take great advantage of any disaster on planetary scale: nuclear accidents and tests, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts.. any event that scatters dust or chemicals with clear "signature" and for a short period of time is... kind of a blessing when it comes to reconstructing the climate history! Sorry..

 

> "Really cool images otherwise! Reminds me of the microscopic views of foraminiferans (in plankton), like tiny jewels..." - oh, yeah, once I put a drop of lake water in a microscope and was amazed at the number of diatoms and other fast-moving, otherwise invisible, things!!!

I remember in the early 90's, as a grad student in glaciology, that we talked about using the chernobyl fallout as a marker. Prior to this the atomic bombs from Japan and later nuclear tests could used as stratigraphic markers. However, there are other methods that are much more efficient for determining the age of ice along a core. These include oxygen isotopes, electrical conductivity, and visual counting of seasonal layers. The real benifit of using the radiometric markers is that the are known to be an instant in time. They are best used to compare between glaciers.