Here is a photo of Mr. Grumphus Bumfus Bunn B. Doofus, Esq., giving the girls a dirty look.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Mother Nature cooperates with my research
I finally got some samples of coarse-grained snow, which I hadn't been able to find since December. All that had been available was the fine, fluffy stuff, and I need to test both. I finally found my magic spot on the Tanana this morning, a few miles downstream from where I get on the river. I filled the two tupperware containers I had with me, which should be good enough to keep me amused today and tomorrow. By Friday I will have purchased a cheap plastic sled from Freddie's, and I will load it with tupperware and tow it down the river, with the girls' help, and get enough samples of all kinds of snow to last me through the end of this Summer. Yay!
Here is a photo of Mr. Grumphus Bumfus Bunn B. Doofus, Esq., giving the girls a dirty look.
Here is a photo of Mr. Grumphus Bumfus Bunn B. Doofus, Esq., giving the girls a dirty look.
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2 comments:
How do you keep snow? Wouldn't storing it in a freezer introduce another varable?
Yes, it is very astute of you to point that out. Snow metamorphoses very quickly once it falls. The first step is that it loses the detail those beautiful hexagonal lattices. The tips sublimate off, and the frost gets deposited in the acute angles. Soon you have nothing but blah crystals like grains of sand. Then the grains of sand change, too. The large ones grow at the expense of smaller ones. Also, they sinter together with time, forming a porous lattice.
In my freezer, all of these processes continue to occur, but I keep my "official" samples surrounded by sacrificial "throwaway" snow, so the humidity stays high and sublimation is much less likely to occur.
As for the processes of crystal growth and sintering, those do still occur, but they occur in a way that is no different from the way they do in nature. And since I am only interested in aged snow, it makes no difference to me whether it was aged outside or aged in my freezer. :)
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