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Ice... what?
Case study: ледяные иглы
Context: Working on iced-over rivers, toward the spring thaw. It's said that if you hit one of these "иглы" lightly, the ice may fall apart by the next day.
I cannot find the term in any dictionary (getting to be a habit...) or online. (Actually, Multitran.ru gives "frazil ice" but some further research - at the River Ice Guide and Glossary - tends to put the kibosh on that idea. Frazil ice, from the description, seems to already be pretty "fallen apart.")
So, I go looking for ледяные иглы on Rambler and end up, God help me, at a Ukrainian UFO site, at a page that discusses what's on Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons. There's a part of me that's reluctant to trust anything published by UFO enthusiasts, as quite often, they don't know what they're talking about, but then again some of them do, so...
I'm running out of time, what in chess is known as zeitnot.
A quick look-see for "Callisto ice" on Google lands me at at a kind of mainstream NASA page, which shows the same graphics as are shown on the Ukrainian page (albeit slightly skewed), and talks about...
...drum roll, please..... and I quote, from the NASA page:
Unless something better comes along, "ice knobs" it is.
Cheers...
Context: Working on iced-over rivers, toward the spring thaw. It's said that if you hit one of these "иглы" lightly, the ice may fall apart by the next day.
I cannot find the term in any dictionary (getting to be a habit...) or online. (Actually, Multitran.ru gives "frazil ice" but some further research - at the River Ice Guide and Glossary - tends to put the kibosh on that idea. Frazil ice, from the description, seems to already be pretty "fallen apart.")
So, I go looking for ледяные иглы on Rambler and end up, God help me, at a Ukrainian UFO site, at a page that discusses what's on Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons. There's a part of me that's reluctant to trust anything published by UFO enthusiasts, as quite often, they don't know what they're talking about, but then again some of them do, so...
I'm running out of time, what in chess is known as zeitnot.
A quick look-see for "Callisto ice" on Google lands me at at a kind of mainstream NASA page, which shows the same graphics as are shown on the Ukrainian page (albeit slightly skewed), and talks about...
...drum roll, please..... and I quote, from the NASA page:
During the Callisto flyby, Galileo's camera saw spire-like "knobs" jutting 80 to 100 meters (260 to 330 feet) high, consisting perhaps of material thrown outward from a major impact billions of years ago. The knobs are very icy, but they also harbor some darker dust. The dark material seems to be sliding down the knobs and collecting in low-lying areas. [empahsis mine]The term fits the context, and is certainly more fitting than "frazil ice," IMAO.
Unless something better comes along, "ice knobs" it is.
Cheers...