
Hair Ice - lentil_soup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_ice
======
TheTaytay
What a coincidence! During the hard freeze on New Year's Eve here in Austin,
TX, I discovered a field of this stuff in my back yard. When I first saw it, I
didn't even recognize it as ice! It looked more like a fungus at first, and
only after touching it and seeing that it was dissolving did I realize what it
was. After some Googling, I came across this exact Wikipedia article (thanks
Wikipedia!).

Here's a photo album of it:
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/EZ74yJaMZX8VuoEp7](https://photos.app.goo.gl/EZ74yJaMZX8VuoEp7)

My favorite examples:
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/JX1f8uhrvnj4k6EY9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/JX1f8uhrvnj4k6EY9)
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/ADD2cojZoEvvRBjH8](https://photos.app.goo.gl/ADD2cojZoEvvRBjH8)

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lighttower
Your location (address photos were taken) and full name are visible from the
link you shared.

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skate22
Is that any different than picking a random person from a phone book

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hackerman12345
Someone unhinged who strongly disagreed with one of his previous comments
might take this as an easy harassment vector.

~~~
skate22
Fair point, i agree

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Luc
Worth checking out the main source of that article for more details and
pictures:
[https://boris.unibe.ch/75002/1/bg-12-4261-2015.pdf](https://boris.unibe.ch/75002/1/bg-12-4261-2015.pdf)

~~~
abecedarius
I skimmed the paper wondering if there could be some fitness benefit for the
fungus. Unless I missed it, they don't suggest any. Anyone have a guess?

~~~
larkeith
I wonder if the ice might help protect against extreme low temperatures? Fur
on animals traps air, acting as an insulator, so it might be similar here. As
the fungus (presumably) provides negligible heat output, it would probably
only protect against temporary cold flashes, rather than sustained lows -
perhaps unusually cold nights?

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sslayer
Bigger picture thought here - how many unique survival mechanisms exist in
floura/fawna/fungi in species that survived from the ice age(s) to today that
are only exhibited in extreme temperatures/unique atmospheric conditions. And
particularly,how many have we not yet observed/studied due to those conditions
not existing currently.

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p3llin0r3
"Hair Ice" sounds flat and un-poetic, like Donald Trump named it.

"Frost Beard" is the OBVIOUSLY superior name of this phenomenon.

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whamlastxmas
Even in a thread about ice forming on trees, someone manages to bring up
Trump. Amazing.

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kchr
Is Trump the modern equivalent of Godwin? :-)

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baud147258
Not yet.

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Giroflex
It's interesting how lifeforms can mold materials into shapes and states we'd
otherwise never think of, or that maybe would even be impossible to produce.
The strong silk some spiders make is another example.

Leads me to think that there are a lot of undiscovered properties of materials
that could potentially be unlocked by engineering different life forms. We're
pretty far from exploring all the possibilities in manufacturing techniques.

~~~
curo
This is related to another burning question I have (maybe someone knows): why
aren't more resources, students, professionals focused on material sciences?

I have friends in AI, biotech, clean tech, web/apps, robotics, but none in
material sciences. And yet materials are so important technologically that we
name ages after them (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age). I lived in "Silicon
Valley" even — our industries and progress are so tied to materials, why isn't
there more of a focus on material science?

~~~
semi-extrinsic
There is. It's just that materials science is a bona fide Hard Problem that
requires tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in lab equipment
(synchrotrons, free electron lasers, the good stuff), supercomputers etc. to
advance, so it's studied by top universities, National Labs and so forth. It's
not really something you can "disrupt".

~~~
perl4ever
Nevertheless, there have been recent claims that it _is_ being disrupted, by
the current buzzwords, AI and machine learning.

See: [https://www.nature.com/news/can-artificial-intelligence-
crea...](https://www.nature.com/news/can-artificial-intelligence-create-the-
next-wonder-material-1.19850)

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natestemen
i love seeing wikipedia articles making it to the front page. no opinions,
just a cool wiki article that probably most people have never heard of.

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krylon
Me too! I love these random chunks of knowledge floating by...

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blattimwind
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)

~~~
quickthrower2
Imagine submitting that and everyone will be talking about a different
article.

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tuukkah
Less strange but in my experience even rarer is to have a frozen lake grow
bushes of ice crystals like in the first picture here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_crystals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_crystals)

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ddtaylor
Apparently this can happen in the Washinton area:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIOGeVPlbWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIOGeVPlbWM)

~~~
randomstring
I can report that it does. I've seen this hiking in Snohomish County, WA. Hair
ice looks a bit like cotton fluff, like something splitting out of a seed pod.
It looks like it is growing out of the pieces of wood or bark. The ice crushes
like a lightly packed snowball.

Of course this means you have to go hiking in the cold. Totally worth it.

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kiallmacinnes
The original 1918 theory confirmed in 2015.

My mind usually defaults to "most things have already been discovered AND
confirmed", seeing something like this confirmed only so recently is always
cool, as it forces me to rethink some of my assumptions!

(Yes, I know there are plenty of undiscovered, and even more unconfirmed
things out there, that doesn't change my mind's default reaction though!)

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luk32
We got good models for pretty good chunk of phenomena of scales from subatomic
to galaxy wide and beyond. Astonishing is the fact that same laws give good
predictions on both ends of the scale. I think that's the reason behind the
assumption we have most figured out.

But in the middle happens most what we cannot comprehend. How does a cell know
when to divide. How exactly the process goes. Why do we have consciousness?
Having theories capable of describing atoms and stars we can't figure out the
middle, this is fascinating.

Imho the issue is the complexity of system. Stars and atoms are actually not
that far apart. In the middle the amount of effects with comparable magnitude
and stable states are the greatest.

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mkirklions
Maybe this is worth updating on wikipedia.

They didnt know that around freezing you have equilibrium that is both melting
and freezing.

As you leave that the equilibrium shifts to freezing only.

Thinking that each of those fibers from the moss start the strand and the ice
grows as a result.

EDIT: Chem engineer here, not sure what to cite on something like this, or
even the proper language.

~~~
jschwartzi
This sounds like statistical mechanics thinking to me. At the macro-level,
water that is at freezing temperature but that has not frozen yet will appear
liquid. However, what's happening at the micro level in the fluid is that
small pockets of the water are switching back and forth from frozen to liquid
as their bonds tighten up from loss of thermal energy. There's still enough
energy in regions of the liquid mass such that these isolated crystals may not
be crystals for very long, because the thermal energy transfers from hotter to
colder regions, but because the whole mass is bleeding energy into an external
system it will eventually reach a tipping point where larger crystals can
persist for longer, until eventually the water turns into ice.

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glup
I saw either this or needle ice while hiking in North Carolina in winter of
2016. I couldn't figure out what to Google at the time. It made an extremely
satisfying sound to step on (there was tons of it so I didn't feel bad).

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rising-sky
How Hair Ice grows:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_RJ1z22Vw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_RJ1z22Vw)

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vinceguidry
Pleasantly surprised, I thought clicking through would lead to something
_much_ grosser.

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amingilani
Yeah, I kept reading it as "Hair lice". Glad to have been mistaken.

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arunpgandhi
Reminds me of Storm's hair from Xmen
[https://img.cinemablend.com/quill/a/2/6/f/7/d/a26f7da9ff28d2...](https://img.cinemablend.com/quill/a/2/6/f/7/d/a26f7da9ff28d22f19bedee23c299e499bfda696.jpg)

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thedailymail
You need to dig pretty deep in chemistry to find a molecule with a range of
properties stranger than H2O.

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CarVac
I see this all the time doing winter hiking in Harriman State Park in NY.

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BenjiWiebe
Well obviously, harri man...

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dogma1138
Pretty neat any real world applications? I would suspect cryogenics might be a
pretty good contender considering that the control of ice-crystal formation is
pretty important for preserving tissue. The recrystallisation inhibitor
properties of what ever proteins are involved in this seems to be just what is
needed as they prevent small ice-crystals from forming larger ones and the
large crystals are the problem as they burst tissue.

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VLM
I wonder if hair ice would be better, or worse, on an aircraft wing. I think
it can't be structurally stronger, so it should get knocked or blown off
easier, but I'm only about 60% more confident. A better deicer solution would
be an interesting market disruption.

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apo
Somewhere there's a commercial application or two for this waiting to be
discovered.

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tamersalama
Stuff of legends. I wonder if there are any local tales about trees with
beards?

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0xcafecafe
Tolkien wrote Treebeard in LOTR. Grey beard could be this?

"a large Man-like figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a
tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and
grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. Arms, at a
short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown
smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. Grey beard, deep brown eyes,
shot with a green light"

