Photo reblogged from Solecism with 32 notes
Detailed instructions for artificial glacier construction are available in this 2008 New Scientist article by Ed Douglas, “How to grow a glacier,” which in turn draws heavily on the master’s thesis of Norweigian International Environment and Development Studies student, Ingvar Teiten (available as a pdf).
Fascinatingly, it seems that ice can be differentiated by gender, for glacier-building purposes at least:
A “male” glacier is one that is covered in stones and soil and moves slowly or not at all. A “female” one is whiter, and grows more quickly, yielding more water. “It is important to have both sexes,” a glacier grower from the village of Ghwari in Baltistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, told Tveiten, “The ice which we found underneath the rocks in our own valley was only of one sex. Therefore it didn’t increase. We had to add the opposite sex to it so it could increase.”IMAGE: (left to right, top to bottom) 2″ ice cube, hand-carved ice sphere, snow, and an 8″ ice cube column. All photos by Melissa Hom, from a slideshow in New York magazine. (roomthily)
Source: ediblegeography.com
