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Paul S
Joined: 20 Mar 2010
Posts: 79
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Posted: May 03, 2010 06:31 Post subject: Mineral ice specimen |
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While browsing the list of IMA approved minerals I came across ice. I was a bit surprised about it, but it is actually very logical. I am however wondering if there is a single mineral specimen of ice in someones private collection.
You would have to get a very specific climate to store the specimen and prevent if from melting. The transport would also be very difficult and you could never touch with your bare hands!
So is there anyone out there with mineral ice specimen in their collection?
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crocoite
Joined: 06 Feb 2009
Posts: 490
Location: Ballarat, Victoria
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Posted: May 03, 2010 07:06 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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I had one once, but I put it down somewhere, and now I can't find it...
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Jim Prentiss
Joined: 01 Dec 2009
Posts: 103
Location: Ohio
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Posted: May 03, 2010 07:18 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Hello,
Kinda makes you think. One of the most important minerals to man is Ice in its molten form.
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ian jones
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 112
Location: london
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Posted: May 03, 2010 07:22 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Have a small collection of cubes that I keep in the fridge for gin & tonics!
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Peter Megaw
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Joined: 13 Jan 2007
Posts: 964
Location: Tucson, Arizona
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Posted: May 03, 2010 08:00 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Check out Edwin Cloptin's excellent article on the crystallography of ice in: Rocks and Minerals 1994, v. 69 #2! Got best article of the year award for it!
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alfredo
Site Admin
Joined: 30 Jan 2008
Posts: 984
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Posted: May 03, 2010 09:44 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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I don't keep ice, but I do have some other mineral specimens that have to be kept in the refrigerator, like some nice melanterite crystals, which would only last a few hours in a regular display case.
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Tobi
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Joined: 07 Apr 2009
Posts: 4162
Location: Germany
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Posted: May 03, 2010 09:49 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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crocoite wrote: | I had one once, but I put it down somewhere, and now I can't find it... | :-) :-) :-)
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Matt_Zukowski
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Joined: 10 Apr 2009
Posts: 715
Location: Alaska
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Posted: May 04, 2010 01:38 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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I know a bunch of people who have spent their entire careers studying ice. My MS thesis for geology was entitled, A study of Northern Alaskan Snow Chemistry, and my chairman was an expert in seasonal snow. One of the things i did for my assistantship money was dig innumerable snow pits noting many thing including stratigraphic changes in snow xtal habit. During a typical seasonal snow cycle, snow falls as an igneous rock, evolves as a metamorphic rock, undergoes partial melting episodes, and finally becomes magma again.
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Carl
Joined: 07 May 2009
Posts: 28
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Posted: May 04, 2010 01:39 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Ice (H2O in solid state) has an exceptionally rare characteristic that if it did not have it there would likely be no life on earth. H20 in its solid form is less dense than in its liquid form. If ice was heavier than water it is likely that the Earth would not have thawed following the snowball-Earth periods.
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Jason
Joined: 31 Dec 2008
Posts: 254
Location: atlanta
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Posted: May 04, 2010 01:39 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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gin and tonic...lol..hmm..might need to come over and see your mineral collection some time:)
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James Catmur
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Joined: 14 Sep 2006
Posts: 1379
Location: Cambridge
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Posted: May 04, 2010 05:51 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Last winter I broke into a 2m x 1m x 50cm cavity next to a large boulder that was full of amazing ice crystals. Some were up to 3cm long and on the side of the cavity there was a 10+cm group of crystals that had developed as an amazing spray. It was truely amazing and one of the best crystal cavities I have found. My children were with me so we had a great time looking at this fantastic crystal pocket.
Sadly I had no camera with me and clearly could not bring any of the specimens home. If I had they would have been a fantastic addition to the collection.
James
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Screenname
Joined: 20 Feb 2010
Posts: 99
Location: Washington
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Posted: May 27, 2010 14:03 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Would be a hard to store, even in a freezer because when you open and close a freezer moisture gets in and forms ice in the freezer, in case anyone didn't know what is why the inside of a freezer frosts. Any how that frost would alter the specimen. Pictures would be the best way to preserve these specimens, I have herd of many people who photograph snowflakes, though I am not sure it is for a mineral collection most likely a photography collection but it is likely this is the best way to collect ice crystals.
And making your own ice isn't considered an actual mineral, it's actually an artificial mineral like growing your salt crystals at home
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Matt_Zukowski
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Joined: 10 Apr 2009
Posts: 715
Location: Alaska
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Posted: May 27, 2010 19:42 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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In northern Alaska you get thick layers of completely recrystalized snow with large xtals as you describe. Often they are hoppered. These vapor recrystalization layers lack strength, and are great at generating avalanches.
Once when I was up on the slope cruzing around on my snow machine, there was a wide valley with a thick weak layer about 1 foot thick waiting to fall. As I entered the valley, the snow near me fell first, and the collapse field moved out radially at a speed faster than my snow machine. It was one of the most amazing (and trippy) things I have ever seen. I stopped the machine and watched in awe.
Snow xtal habit is usually controlled by water vapor saturation and temperature. A good figure can be found at:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/primer/morphologydiagram.jpg
(link normalized by FMF)
One of the bibles of water physics when i was in grad school was "Properties of ordinary water-substance in all its phases: water-vapor, water, and all the ices."
by N. Ernest Dorsey
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Elise
Joined: 22 Dec 2009
Posts: 243
Location: New York State
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Posted: Nov 17, 2012 18:36 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Hi,
With winter on the way I thought it would be fun to revive this topic. This morning I found my outdoor mineral collection covered with frost. There were different types of crystals growing on different species. All was burning off before my eyes at 7:30 AM, but a few photos show a bit of the variation: anthracite and tremolite had long, lush growths of acicular crystals while others like garnets and quartz seemed to be populated by more granular crystals. All just in fun...
Cheers!
Elise
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Almandine Gore Mt, NY approx. 18x16 cm |
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Anthracite (coal) Pennsylvania approx. 18x9cm |
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Anthracite (coal) Pennsylvania |
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Tremolite (blue) with selenite in background approx 18cm |
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Quartz approx. 3 cm Hopper crystals at top? |
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Dravite Northwestern Adirondacks,NY approx. 7 cm |
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Almandiine crystals on schist 20 x 10 cm
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Elise
Joined: 22 Dec 2009
Posts: 243
Location: New York State
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Posted: Nov 20, 2012 08:56 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Hi Matt,
Does the crystal system of the substrate the ice grows on have any bearing on what habit it takes? Since taking the previous photos, I've been observing the frost growth on the various minerals each morning - the specimens should all be at about the same temperature after enduring a long night (lately 29 degrees F), yet all seem to have different forms of frost growing on them by early morning. It could just be for a number of reasons, or combination of several, but I think it is neat never-the-less.
Cheers,
Elise
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Chris Foltz
Joined: 28 Oct 2012
Posts: 92
Location: Maryland
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Posted: Nov 20, 2012 19:10 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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ICE 9...
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Matt_Zukowski
Site Admin
Joined: 10 Apr 2009
Posts: 715
Location: Alaska
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Posted: Nov 20, 2012 21:24 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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What an interesting idea. I don’t know of any studies that directly link the macroscopic structure of ice xtals with the substrates on which they nucleate.
At a micro scale, we know well that substrate structure is important for ice xtal nucleation - the closer the structure of a substrate is to ice, the lower the free energy of nucleation on that substrate. This is why people seed clouds with AgI, which has a structure similar to ice. We also know that as the temperature of a substrate decreases, the ability of ice nucleation to overcome mismatches between ice and substrate structure increases. But if you look at snow flake morphology on a macro scale, it seems to be controlled by the various regimes of temperature and humidity that the snowflake falls through, no matter what substrates the ice xtals nucleated on.
Can you think of any other reasons why you observed different ice xtal morphologies on different substrates? Are darker colored rocks (which may have been warmer) different from lighter colored rocks? Are ice xtals in sheltered areas different from those in more exposed areas? Shelter in this case could mean either shelter from wind or from open sky (the more open sky a surface “sees,” the more radiative cooling that surface will receive).
Interesting.
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Elise
Joined: 22 Dec 2009
Posts: 243
Location: New York State
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Posted: Nov 21, 2012 09:04 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Matt_Zukowski wrote: |
Can you think of any other reasons why you observed different ice xtal morphologies on different substrates? Are darker colored rocks (which may have been warmer) different from lighter colored rocks? Are ice xtals in sheltered areas different from those in more exposed areas? |
After a week of cold nights, it's now warmer...science is thus thwarted. What started me thinking about all this was that there seemed to be no obvious rhyme or reason: the two darkest crystals - the coal and the garnet - had such different frost growth on them, while the black coal and the light-colored blue tremolite had the similar acicular crystals. The garnet and the tremolite are high SG while the coal is quite light; all the specimens are of similar large size. Their different surface textures might support different micro-environments or have different orientations relative to the night sky -- it could be that the needles formed later in the night than the granules when conditions might have been different. Lots of questions to think about!
I think it will take a long time to sort out all the combinations of factors influencing the frost growth, but it has been fun to watch and to think of analogies to what happens inside a vug over a much longer period of time. I was just reading in the Lithographie Amethyst monograph about the Jacksons Crossroads deposits in which sprays of colorless quartz grew during early environmental conditions and larger stumpy deep purple crystals grew among them later as conditions changed (pg 81)- not exactly analogous, but one thought leads to another. John's earlier thread shows the difference https://www.mineral-forum.com/message-board/viewtopic.php?p=24244&highlight=#24244
Cheers
Elise
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Chris Foltz
Joined: 28 Oct 2012
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Location: Maryland
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Posted: Nov 21, 2012 12:34 Post subject: Re: Mineral ice specimen |
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Irving Langmuir - Polymorph of water...
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Carl
Joined: 07 May 2009
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Posted: Dec 21, 2012 15:41 Post subject: Re: Ice crystals in a light-artwork |
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I love water/ice crystals. Hoar frost can be particularly spectacular. Please don't hesitate to attach more pictures!
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Ice Jefferson County, New York FOV ~4" |
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