In the ancient geographical treatise "Wonders of the World", compiled from the stories of Arab travelers and who have visited the far northern latitudes, there is a description of "captive falling waters" - water splashes frozen on the rocks in the form of bizarre sculptures of dragons and mythical animals
You can see such captive frozen waters in winter on the coastal rocks of the Baikal capes. The ice is full of mysteries. Scientists have not yet been able to explain some of its properties.
Baikal ice is famous for its unique transparency. The reason for this is not only the amazing purity of Baikal water, in which there are few dissolved and suspended mineral substances, but also in the wisdom of the laws of nature. Every year, when ice crystallizes, huge masses of surface water are cleaned of impurities.
Ice is cleaner than water
A growing ice crystal always strives to create an ideal crystal lattice and displace foreign substances, therefore natural ice is usually much cleaner than the water from which it is formed. The thickness of the transparent Baikal ice is not felt at all, and it can be estimated only by the width of the cracks inside the ice. When the ice is young and there are no cracks nearby, the feeling is that you are standing over an abyss, where you can immediately fall through. Through the ice, you can see floating fish, stones at the bottom, a scuba diver - and all this at a depth of up to 40 m. In the thickness of the ice, you can observe disseminations of frozen gas bubbles that rise from the bottom of the lake, amazing patterns and bizarre cracks. On January 25 this year, on the mirror-like young black ice in Peschanaya Bay, we saw unusual natural formations frozen inside the ice. Star-shaped structures with 6–7 radiant tentacles, no larger than a man's palm with outstretched fingers, had a strange and attractive appearance from science fiction films, as if they were growing embryos of future living organisms trapped in ice from space.
Scientists at a loss
Upon my return to Irkutsk, I showed the images of frozen jellyfish to ice connoisseurs and scientists from the Limnological Institute of the SB RAS. Much to their surprise, the question of the mechanism of their occurrence puzzled scientists - no one could explain what it is. In addition, it turned out that specialists studying Baikal ice had never seen anything like this before, and to determine the nature of the anomaly they required precise coordinates and cut ice with a sample for research. The radiant dendridic structure of surface ice, according to scientists, is possible, but how it is formed, there are no unambiguous explanations. As in the history of the Tunguska phenomenon, the number of various hypotheses does not allow us to determine which mechanism creates such intricate imprints inside the ice and on its surface. Our first impression wasthat these are unknown microorganisms growing inside the ice. We even conditionally called them “ice eaters”. The version about algae was excluded immediately, no plant inclusions in the center of the asterisk were observed. The impact nature of the appearance of an imprint on the ice from the fall of a material object did not fit either - there was no dent, chipped marks or characteristic cracks. There were many such unusual imprints on the ice along the Bolshaya Kolokolnya cliff in Peschanaya Bay, and they had a shape similar to each other. It was young ice that had risen two days ago. No one had ever come to Peschanaya Bay before us and, therefore, could not spill fuel oil or other ice-aggressive liquid with spots. What all the same was - traces of a point energy impact on the ice from above from the Star Wars series or the results of bursting of gas bubbles when they freeze and accumulate in the ice from below - remained unclear for us. Never before have I met such formations in the Baikal ice, similar to the imprint of an electric discharge and resembling the six-rayed shape of snowflakes.
reference
The ice is full of mysteries. Scientists have not yet been able to explain some of its properties. After the sensational film "The Great Mystery of Water", attention was paid to hard water - ice. According to the latest data, it has 14 structural modifications. In recent years, many discoveries have been made in the physics of ice. In its isotopic composition, it differs from the water from which it was formed. Most of the impurities dissolved in water are not transferred to the ice, when it begins to grow - they freeze out. Sometimes ice fields acquire the ability to glow for a long time in the dark, emitting a weak light after being illuminated by the sun, as if they have electroluminescence. The water obtained by melting a piece of ice has amazing properties - if you use it, seeds germinate faster and better, and sprouts develop. Growing ice crystals emit electromagnetic waves. However, no one has yet studied the effect of ice on the human brain, because a long stay on screening ice, above a kilometer-long water column, theoretically should affect the content of dreams.
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Sergey VOLKOV
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