Hey Blog! This week is all about two extremes: icy weather and trying to light fires!
You may remember last year I bought a sledge; subsequent snowy weather meant the week after we acquired it, it had its first use. Well, so far this year has failed us for sledging dreams, but we did have what Dad calls a “sugar frosting”: thin snowfall like the icing on a cake. It’s not enough to ride down a hill on, but enough to make it significantly cold! (well, not if you’ve lived at -40C° in Mongolia like Mum did…) As a result, there has been a cold period; we reckon colder than it has been while we have lived here! Luckily, we have the money to be able to heat the house, so we do have a nice warm house to come back to. Apparently, this winter the economy is going to crash, and combine that with a sharp drop in temperatures could prove disastrous for people, especially as the NHS has gone nuts and the strikes are proving that people are at the end of their tether…
All snowflakes have six sides. The reason behind this is that basically it’s the most efficient way to pack the water molecules – each with one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms – into a space. It’s also due to how they form (I could keep on all night at this) but let’s stop there. Snow itself is water that has been heated to take it up from the surface of the ocean in vaporous form – AKA evaporation; and then cooled so much in the sky it has turned to ice – firstly condensation then freezing/solidification; then, when heated again, melting. However, these changes run Liquid → Gas, Gas → Liquid, Liquid → Solid, Solid → Liquid; but there are another two changes – Gas → Solid, and Solid → Gas. They are deposition, and sublimation, respectively. We even witnessed the latter of these at Watch Group on Sunday last week, where we had a campfire.
This was the last watch group of the year, but surprisingly only one family other than the two who lead it (mine and another, Mum took the dad in this family on as a co-leader earlier this year) showed up. However, the small group size meant it was easier to run the fire. After the session two of us tried melting snow – and got a lot of water in the pan, but a small amount as there wasn’t much snow, and the density of ice is less than the density of water for the same volume (that means there are more atoms in a pan of water than atoms in snow in the same pan). However, putting snow directly on the fire showed ice transforming directly into water vapour – the sublimation from the last paragraph!
I hope you will join me this Christmas, to see what other antics I get up to!