What is the connection between ice and salt? | The stone ax Science | EUROtoday

Salt—sodium chloride—a substance that we use to season our meals, maintains a relationship—let’s name it ionic—with ice, since, by including salt to ice water, what we’re attaining is mixing the water molecules with the sodium and chloride ions that make up the salt, stopping these water molecules from forming ice crystals once they attain 0°C.

For this purpose, salt is often added to the soil when there’s snow. However, essentially the most appropriate salt for melting snow is calcium chloride, which melts ice extra rapidly, being confirmed efficient at temperatures of -30°C, whereas sodium chloride loses its impact from -6°C. But, let’s depart the technical information for the second and return to sea salt, on this case that of the Arctic Ocean, the place we uncover a notable combination between contemporary and salty waters, with contemporary water being discovered within the higher, colder and fewer dense layer, whereas within the decrease layer are the hotter and saltier waters. And, due to the latter, additionally denser.

With the drainage of the brine and its sinking because of the added weight, the change of plenty takes place by way of the oceanic circulation of the waters of the North Pole, a phenomenon skilled by the boys of the expedition that, in May 1845, headed to the Arctic Ocean from the port of Greenhithe, England, with the purpose of discovering the Northwest Passage – the maritime route that crosses the Arctic bordering North America to the north. To perform the mission, greater than 100 sailors had been enrolled on two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror.

Sir John Franklin was in command of main an expedition that was by no means heard from once more till 14 years after his departure, when one other expedition, led by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, found the signal of catastrophe in an ice cairn. From this historic materials, the American author Dan Simmons recreates the occasion in an thrilling novel titled The Terror (Rock publishing).

To make this fiction primarily based on actual occasions, Dan Simmons dealt with exhaustive documentation. In a meticulous method, Simmons performs with the hypotheses of the time and does so intimately. Without going any additional, he mentions the information that appeared within the Times newspaper, when consultants thought-about the chance that the so-called Gulf Stream—the Atlantic present of heat water—flowed upward, warming the Arctic Ocean. Seen from a distance, it was all so mindless that it was even proposed that the Southgate prisoners be despatched to the North Pole to extract coal. There was discuss of the mineral wealth that the invisible continent provided.

Today, the world—our world—is popping the other way up. The Gulf Stream is weakening, which is able to trigger harsher winters for Europe, whereas the nice and cozy, salty waters of the Atlantic are spreading northward, inflicting what known as the atlantification of the Arctic, a phenomenon that leads the Arctic Ocean to soften and grow to be hotter and saltier.

The world of John Franklin’s misplaced Arctic expedition has little or nothing to do with the world of at this time; and even much less will it need to do with tomorrow, nearer to the world that Dan Simmons proposes in Hyperion’s Songs (Nova), a science fiction novel collection that tells us how, within the twenty eighth century, humanity expands all through the galaxy after having deserted the Earth in a terminal state following the revolt of Artificial Intelligences in opposition to human beings.

Not to be pessimistic, however Dan Simmons builds his novels with previous occasions, in the identical method he does with occasions which might be to come back; and it carries it out with out forgetting that we belong to a society dominated by its unsure future.