This beautiful alien landscape painting is correctly here on Earth : a never - end sea of ice flowers quietly floating over a thinly frozen ocean . These foreign icing construction are very rich in salinity and bacterium — and very hard to pick , according to oceanography doctoral candidate Jeff Bowman .
Bowman explains how they grow :
When ocean ice forms during the polar wintertime it is often potential to honor the growth of frost flowers , intricate structures that are composed from quick-frozen atmospheric moisture and from seawater loathsome from the ocean ice surface . The transport of saltwater into these social system means that they are unusually salty , up to 5 time the salinity of the sea . By this same mechanism other thing in seawater dressed ore in frost flowers , let in bacteria .
Although hoar efflorescence are very abundant in the Arctic and Antarctic getting to them is n’t sluttish . The ice underneath them is often too thin to walk across and prostrate to drifting with the wind . The canonical sampling strategy is to find a place where the water is stay fresh exposed by winds or current ( called a steer if smaller and little lived , polynya if large and more permanent ) .
According toDr . Martini at Deep Sea News , you need these conditions for them to get :
1 ) Calm fart . We ca n’t have these mantrap fumble away can we ?
2 ) Cold , moth-eaten melodic line . It has to be about 20C less than the water and since saltwater freezes around -2C , that means the aviation must be about -22C or -7.6F. BRRR .
I hope I see these one daytime with my own oculus . [ Jeff S. BowmanandDeep Sea News ]
Image by Matthias Wietz .
An internal-combustion engine flower grown in the research lab .
scientific discipline
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