SciShow Tangents - Ice and Snow

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

From sugary snow cones to WWII plans for an aircraft carrier made of ice and wood pulp, humans have had big dreams for frozen water. So this week, we’re exploring the science of snow and ice across the globe. Turns out, there are ancient refrigerators in the dry Iranian desert and abandoned military bases under the Greenland ice sheet. And even though Japanese snow monkeys seem all cozy and chill in their hot springs, what mischief do they get up to in their free time? Sources:[Truth Or Fail]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-015-0492-0https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/japans-monkeys-wash-their-potatoes-and-ride-deer-like-horseshttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chilling-out-hot-springs-may-help-japans-snow-monkeys-reduce-stress-180968686/[Fact Off]Camp Century:http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/drill_analysing/history_drilling/drill_bedrock/https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/mysterious-ice-buried-cold-war-military-base-may-be-unearthed-climate-changehttp://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/about_centre/history/https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalanceIceboxes:http://eartharchitecture.org/?p=570[Ask the Science Couch]http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/11/Ice-Alloys.pdfhttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-glaciology/article/description-of-the-iceberg-aircraft-carrier-and-the-bearing-of-the-mechanical-properties-of-frozen-wood-pulp-upon-some-problems-of-glacier-flow/BE12BCCE68FE5D9C307299A2F1F2DFC6[Butt One More Thing]https://www.livescience.com/61018-turtles-breathe-through-butt.html

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Today we've got with us, as always, Stefan Chin, producer of SciShow. How are you doing, Stefan? Yo. What's your tagline? Habanero dreaming. Oh, that's a really good one.

We're also joined by producer of SciShow Kids, Sam Schultz. Hello. Stefan made me forget my tagline. That's a great tagline. And also script editor, Sari Reilly. Check out these hot glue guns. And I'm Hank Green. Peanut missile.

So to introduce this podcast for you, every week we gather together, try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks. So we do everything we can to stay on topic. But judging from previous conversations with this group, we will not be great at that. So if somebody goes on a tangent, we can decide whether or not that tangent was worth it. And then we can take one of their Hank Bucks away. Basically, the rules are in flux. Don't worry too much about it. Now, as always, we're going to introduce the topic with the traditional science poem. And this week, it's me. I had a very hard time writing my poem.

I'm just, I'm prefacing that because I'm not super proud of it. Sometimes your brain just isn't in the right spot, but you have to do it, and so you make yourself write two science limericks. Oh, you have two. Kind of. Okay. Energy freed that molecule from a polar-to-polar hydrogen bond. Now gas in the air, it flies here and there.

It waits until the cold comes. When conditions ideal diagram it and people want to Instagram it, the molecules freeze to their tiny cloud seeds and they fall on my windshield, goddammit. Hank,

that was great. Why aren't you proud of that? It doesn't make sense. Well, it sounds doesn't make sense. Well, it sounds like it makes sense. When conditions ideal diagram it, that doesn't mean anything. It sounds like a chemistry thing. It sounds like a poem thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just like add in words to make it sound poetic. The secret is that poems are bullshit. Oh, the secret. Sam, what about the secret? You can't tell people the secret. Sorry. You can't write poems now, though, with that secret. It's our intellectual property. So all poems are ours now. We've trademarked the idea of poetry.

Just bullshit poems. Oh, just bullshit poems. So you can't write bullshit poetry. That's just us. That's just us. That's good. Well, I'm into it. And our topic today is ice and snow. And I assume other kinds of solid water. Wait, what other kinds of solid water are there? Besides ice and snow? Besides ice.

Well, we said ice and snow. Snow is ice. Yeah. So there's no reason to say and snow. But I guess it kind of feels like it's not ice because it's snow. And frost doesn't really feel like ice. But it's all ice. It's all ice. There's not a secret one. There feel like ice. Oh. You know. But it's all ice. It's all ice. There's not a secret one. There's like 17 secret ones.

Sari knows about the secret ices. Yeah. I'll let you in on a little secret. There are secret ices. You gotta tell us about them. Are they only on like

Mars and stuff? A lot of them we haven't found and like they couldn't form on Earth. They are secret. We haven't even found them yet. Yeah.

There are like different crystalline structures of ice. So different ways that the ice crystal can form. And sometimes it's relying on different temperatures, different pressures. And some of those temperatures and pressures are hard to get to. Yeah. And the molecular structures shift around. Some of them, I think, are glassier. So they have weird transitions or they behave strangely where they're a solid but

if you squish them a little bit too much then they start getting all amorphous i don't really know a lot about them because this gets to like the really theoretical chemistry yeah yeah it's a pretty like nerdy part of chemistry like there's a lot of thought about ice crystals sure so what So what is ice? Ice is, as Hank's poem said, water molecules that are in a solid form. What is ice? What is solid? So that's the thing. So a solid is when it doesn't fill the container that it's in.

Right. So it stays rigid. And this generally happens when the temperature is low enough that the molecules aren't moving so fast that the little forces that hold the molecules together aren't overcome by the motion of the energy of the heat of the molecules. That is the most abstract way I can explain phase in the podcast. Okay. I think that's a good explanation. cast. Okay. I think that's a good explanation. And water is weird because their liquid form, the liquid form of water molecules is denser than the solid form, which is why ice floats

on liquid water. Which is very weird. Never happens. Doesn't make any sense, but until you're like, oh yeah, weird hydrogen bonds. So it sort of, when it freezes, it's forced to take a certain shape that is actually less dense than the fluid flowing phase.

Does the O in the H2O make it float? No. No, definitely not that. The O does feel like the floatiest letter, though. It should be like the one making it float. It's shaped like a balloon. Yeah. Well, hydrogen is way lighter than oxygen.

16 times lighter than oxygen. What is? Hydrogen. Oh, that's the other one in it. Yeah. Okay. Chemistry is the class that I flunked the most.

Glad to explain as best we could. I hope that it was helpful. It was kind of. Thank you for teaching our children. Also, thank you for being the purveyor of our children, Sam. Also, thank you for being the purveyor of our

Truth or Fail. So, Truth or Fail is the part of our podcast where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The other three panelists have to figure out which one is real, either by deduction or wild guess. And if they do, they get a Hank buck.

But if we're tricked, then Sam gets a Hank buck. All right, Sam, tell us our things. Japanese macaques, a.k.a. snow monkeys, are cute red-faced monkeys native to Japan. They live in super cold and snowy places for primates. And, in fact, they live farther north and in colder temperatures than any other non-human primate. They live farther north and in colder temperatures than any other non-human primate. They are well known for the fact that a certain tribe of them likes to swim in hot springs and hot tubs and stuff. But they also do some other kind of human-like things.

Okay. Oh, you're going to give us three things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All your facts are about snowy macaques. Yeah. You know, it's snow adjacent. Number one. They season their food with herbs they scavenge in the woods.

Number two, they keep pet deer and ride them around. That's amazing. Number three, there is no evidence that taking hot spring baths is helpful to them at all and may in fact be harmful. Oh, just like us. Just like a human. All right. I tried to make that one work. Okay. I mean, I know people who spend too much time in the bath.

Yeah. Like my son, for example. 45 minutes this morning. And he still cried when he got out. That's a perfectly fine bath. What else does he have to do? He's a kid. I can't leave him in there by himself.

I got stuff to do. So number three, much like Hank's child, he spends too much time in the water. And it might be bad. Oh, man. That makes sense.

If there were primates that rode deer, I would have seen a picture of that. It would have been in like

at least half of the anime I've ever seen. That's true. Okay, that makes sense. Herbs and spices thing seems plausible, but also... If they're in the snow, though. They're not all in the snow.

They live everywhere in Japan. Okay. It seems too plausible to me. I don't know. It's just like... Too plausible? Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's typical.

Maybe they pull a leaf from a tree and they stick it on what do they eat do they eat leaves they eat plants I think

mostly is what it seemed like okay so they season it with other herbs yeah they herb their herbs sure

they eat fruit a lot of fruit and apples and stuff oh okay I mean I know that when they first found that like

different groups of dolphins like had similar recipes for how they like to eat food. They'd like grab like several different things and then eat them all together because they liked it better together. That that was like a kind of a big news thing. Basically, they were like doing cooking. There was a culinary tradition among dolphin pods. And that's very cool. But they were different between pods? Yeah.

So they did it different in different groups. Regional dishes. Yeah. I like that. I like it. So I think it would be big science if they found that macaques were kind of cooking. I'm sorry. I have to go with the other one.

What do you mean? The bath? The hot spring bath. Yeah, yeah. Because if I'm a monkey, I will definitely spend an unhealthy amount of time in a hot spring. Like just no doubt in my mind, if I was a monkey that lived in the cold

and there were hot springs around, I would be in the hot spring to my detriment. Sure. Even as a human. Well, there's also other ways that they might be harmful, too, because hot springs have all kinds of bacteria inside. And so I can imagine monkeys not knowing that. Nice to drink the water.

Hanging out. Yeah, they're just drinking the water. They'll get a little thirsty, drink the water. Or they, like, dunk their food in the water. Maybe they want to heat it up, make some stew. Oh, they're cooking. They're cooking. They're cooking.

A little stew. A little fruit stew. Wouldn't it be great if we came across the first humans arrived and the macaques had turned the whole hot spring into soup? Yeah. Just a giant little deer stew. They also kill their little deer in addition to

riding them. That would be cute. They ride them into the soup pot. It's like, here you go. They're just ladling. Hello, humans. I'm a very small monkey. I have a very fuzzy pink face. Would you like some soup?

Please don't kill us all like you definitely would. Yeah. Yeah. I think about that a lot. Maybe just dump them into the soup. It'd be monkey soup then. No. Why would you do that?

Humans would. Humans would, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't now, knowing what I know. But like if I was the first person to ever see them, I'd be like, this is dangerous. You guys know too much. Get in the stew. Get in the soup. Yeah, I think also like, yeah, I think they could dehydrate themselves.

I think they could like heat can mess with your ability to procreate. Like you can mess with your sperm count and stuff. So like maybe that too. Yeah. Okay. I'm in on hot springs. I'm sorry, Sam. This is why I lose.

Why do you apologize? Because I think we're right. You're going to lose all your Hank fucks. No, this is why I lose the game every time. But I'm going to go with the pet deer. All right. Could be the pet deer. Okay.

I'll read the answers one more time. Okay. Number one, they season their food with herbs they scavenge. This is snow monkeys I'm talking about. Number two, they keep pet deer and ride them around. Number three, there is no evidence that taking hot spring baths is helpful to them and may in fact be detrimental. And the right answer is they keep pet deer. No, they don't keep pet deer.

They do. Oh, my God. Look it up. They ride them? Yeah, and they do something even worse to them than I'll tell you about. Oh, no. Can you talk about it on the podcast?

Yeah. Is it legal? They keep these herds of deer. They stand on their backs and pick fruit. The deer let them ride them around. They're not scared of them. They share their food with them and also they hump them.

For sexual gratification, male and females have been observed rubbing on their backs in a sexual manner. Oh my god! Sari Reilly, how did you not know this? I don't know. I'm ashamed. Yes. This seems

like the top of the list of things I would know. Not should, but would. But would. Yeah. Of all the random facts that I know about so many different animals, this would be one of them. Yeah. Especially it's like a weird animal sex fact. Yeah, with the hump.

Right? Oh, my God. They don't let other monkeys hump their own deer either. Wait, like they're monogamous? They have a bunch of... Or other species of monkeys. I think the monkeys that have the deer have a number of deer, and they don't let other monkeys... Like other groups of monkeys?

They've been observed chasing monkeys trying to hump their deer off. So they're like deer ranchers. Yeah, basically. I don't know if they eat... I don't think they eat them. I think they just run around. Yeah, they don't eat them. They don't put them in the soup. No, they do not put them in their stew. These probably are different ones than the ones

that live in the hot springs also. I'm not 100% clear on that. Yeah, I don't know. It's just the same species. In all these pictures, the deer's face is just like... So, I imagine this is what it's like for horses when a human climbed on one for the first time and they were just like, what is happening?

These deer have a monkey climbing on top of them. And they're like, excuse me? Yeah. They don't try to get them off. But the monkeys don't. I don't think they can control where the deer go or anything like that. So the other two are based on real things, too. Okay.

I'm sorry that it's not that snow and ice related. I just got really excited when I saw that they were riding the deer around. I can't believe Stefan got around. I can't believe Stefan got it. I can't believe I trusted you. You were like, I would have known about it.

I was like, yeah, I would have known about it too. This should be in the anime. Yeah. There should be anime

just about this. So, they season their food with herbs they scavenge? No. They season their food in the ocean. Some of them

have been observed throwing sweet potatoes into the ocean. To make it salty? They think to make it salty. They're not 100% positive, but some will just brush it off and some will chuck it

into the ocean and wait for it to come back. I think it's because... The ocean is their soup pot. Yeah, the ocean's a big old soup pot. Yeah. And the evidence of it

not being helpful to take a hot spring bath, they don't know for sure yet if it actually helps them keep warmer because there's maybe other complicating factors like being in a hot tub as a human doesn't necessarily help you not get hypothermia. But they studied the poop of a bunch of the macaques that live in hot springs and they found that the ones that spent the most time in the hot springs had the least amount of stress hormones in their poop. So they are probably less stressed out from being cold all the time. That's a lesson we all could learn. Yeah. They're really chill monkeys.

Man, I want to be a chill monkey. Me too. I think everybody sees those monkeys and thinks, that would be great. Just sit in a hot spring on a beautiful mountain all the time. And then ride your deer around. Yeah. Eat some ocean soup. Well, I'm rich now again you're doing

okay you got two that's pretty good it's better than i got one i don't have anything so i've done nothing you haven't had that oh yeah you have had the opportunity and you blew it yeah i blew it i was too confident speaking of being rich now it's time to hear a word from our sponsors. Nice. Nice. So here's where we're at. Halfway through the show. I got one Hank Buck for my poem. That's just a freebie that I got given. Sam, how many you got?

I got two points. One for, because Sari and I messed up. Stephan, how are you doing? I got one for being a genius. Sari, how about you? I have none, because I'm clearly not one. You guys were so smart, you were stupid. It definitely happens. And now, it's time for the Fact Off,

where two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that they like the most. So, Sari and Stefan are going to hit us with some science facts, and Sam and I are going to decide which science fact we like the most. All right. I'm very curious to hear what ice snow facts

you got for us today. The person who is going to go first is the person who prefers the lowest room temperature. How do you like it, Sari? What's your favorite temp? I don't know. Right now my office is set to 64.

That's very cold.? I don't know. Right now, my office is set to 64. That's very cold. That sounds like a dream. Ours is like 80. Well, how do you like it, Stephan? 74. 74? That's really hot. That's so hot.

Oh, my God. Stephan wears a coat all day, every day. He likes to be toasty. He likes to be toasty. I'm used to those California winters. I'm used to Washington, just in general. Sixties and cloudy. Yeah, I love a crisp fall day.

We had a lot of great crisp fall days last fall. It was a great fall in Missoula. I feel like the global warming thing might be real good for us, actually. It's going to be great for a couple years. It'll be really good. All right, Sari, you're going to tell us your fact. Uninterrupted time begins now. So during the middle of the Cold War in the 1960s,

the United States military initiated a top secret program called Project Iceworm. They wanted to build thousands of miles of tunnels under the northwest Greenland ice, and they wanted to put 600 nuclear missiles that could be launched at the Soviet Union if nuclear war happened in those thousands of miles of tunnels. But the public-facing cover story for this project

was the military outpost called Camp Century, which they did run by the Greenland government. And they tested a bunch of experimental stuff there, like building trenches under the ice,

using new construction techniques, or using a portable nuclear reactor for power. And it was also a place for some really innovative science, because in the 1950s, geologists were just starting to hypothesize that we could study ice cores to understand the past climate. So between 1963 and 1966, the very first ice core sample that drilled all the way down to bedrock was collected.

It was 1,390 meters long and studied in Copenhagen, and it was the first real evidence that analyzing chemical isotopes in ice cores could be used to reconstruct the changing climate from tens of thousands of years ago. Oh. Huh. So something good came out of our idea that, hey, let's turn the ice into just a giant missile launcher. Yep. Let's turn the whole country into a giant missile launcher. And not tell them about it? And not tell them about it.

I don't know how this plan was supposed to go, but 3,000, 2,500 miles of tunnels with 600 missiles in there. I don't know how they were going to sneak those in. Oh, you know, in a boat. Yeah, I guess so. You got a military base. Greenland isn't counting all the stuff that's coming into your military base. We're allies and we're just like, hey, don't check the ice. Why would you check the ice?

There's nothing down here. It's boring down here. But yeah, instead they sent like 200 scientist type people there to be like, can you be a military outpost and do you want to do some science there? So did they put the missiles down there? No. When they did the ice core analysis, so it took them a really long time because these ice cores were huge, they found that the glacier was shifting. I couldn't figure out why exactly, but probably just because they're trying to drill straight down.

Glaciers shift. Yeah. And they were shifting in a way that the base was probably going to collapse. And so the geologists were like, we shouldn't be underground right now. Let's evacuate this and leave it. Yeah. I've also got a great plan. Let's not put a bunch of nuclear missiles inside of this shifting ice sheet. It's still a problem, though, because they had a nuclear reactor to generate power.

And so they had waste that they just left down there. Oh, cool. And so now there's new research that's saying because we left a bunch of garbage underneath Greenland, it's going to, like, the snow melt is going to happen, and by 2090, it's going to be, like, a toxic site. Oh, cool. Great. Because of what we did in the past.

Hey, 2090's past forever away. We're going to have a lot bigger problems by then. Okay, so Sari's fact is that, summarize for us. That the first big ice core samples were taken because of a weird, strange military project in the Cold War. Can I ask one more question? Yeah. Okay, so did they take that, were they digging and then they pulled out an ice core and they were like, huh, I know what we can do with this. and then they pulled out an ice core and they were like, huh, I know what we can do with this.

Or was there already an idea that they could do it and they just tried it while they were also digging these ice tunnels? In the 50s, they first had the idea, like, what if we looked at the chemicals in ice to figure out how the climate changed? And I don't know when they figured out specifically to look at oxygen isotopes. That was probably somewhere in that decade. out specifically to look at oxygen isotopes. That was probably somewhere in that decade. But this was the first time that scientists were able to send a team to a place that was cold enough and where they could put a big drilling machine for long enough. And it was the first time they got this core was, yeah, like 5,000 feet long almost. So they went really, really deep and took it out. And so it was like the most comprehensive evidence that we had at that point to prove that this idea worked. So

before this point, everyone was like, oh, could we look in ice? Maybe could we see things about the climate? But they pulled out this giant ice core and saw changes in oxygen levels throughout it and then mapped out what the climate would have looked like for the past, like, for tens of thousands of years. Cool. And we're like, this works. And now ice cores are used all across climate science. Thanks, Ice.

All right. Time for Stephan. Your uninterrupted time begins now. So in 400 BCE, in modern-day Iran, Persian engineers had developed 60-foot- mud brick domes that were connected to underground chambers that were 5,000 cubic meters in size, which is a little bigger than like two Olympic-sized swimming pools. And the base of the dome had walls that were two meters thick. And the mortar was a nearly waterproof, super insulating material that included ingredients such as egg whites and goat hair. And this whole contraption involved aqueducts, trenches, and wind catchers.

And chilled treats came out of these buildings for the royals. Chilled treats? So basically these allowed them to store ice even in the summer in the middle of the desert. Where did they get the ice? So sometimes they pulled the ice from nearby mountains in the winter and like brought it into these caverns, but they could actually form ice in these buildings. So they had a bunch of cooling mechanisms, like the dome shape draws heat towards the top and there's vents up there.

They even had like walls to like shade the thing so that it would be cooler. So the aqueducts would bring water in and then that would like sort of fill the trenches or like when ice in the building would melt, that would also fill the trenches and that would freeze overnight because in the desert, nights are actually pretty cold. And so it'd freeze and they'd break the ice and then move it into like the storage chamber.

So what kind of cool treats came out? It's just like a Coca-Cola? Is it like a drink or do they make ice cream? I don't remember what it's called. It's just like a Coca-Cola? Is it like a drink or do they make ice cream? I don't remember what it's called. There's like a traditional Arab treat. I'm guessing it's a shaved ice. So it was basically just a thing for the rich people to get treats, to get cool treats.

They did store food in there. Okay, that's good. But it was also used to chill treats for the rich people. I just like the idea of someone like, even back then, they could have been like, dude, why are you refrigerating your bread? You totally don't need to do that. Your ketchup or your butter. Do you refrigerate ketchup? Yeah.

Yeah. Why? Because I like it to be cold when I put my fries in it. Oh, I like it to be room temp. There's so few things that I want to be room temperature. I feel like I want either hot or cold foods. But I also like food that's supposed to be hot, cold. Like pizza?

Pizza is like the quintessential example, but like for me, anything. Tacos, soup, scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs? No. So here's how I know. I'm going to spend on Hank Buck. You guys aren't going to. What? So here's how I know. I'm going to spend on Hank Buck. You guys aren't going to appreciate this.

But here's how I know that like different people are different. Because I will tell you a thing that I like. And everybody, including everybody listening at home, will be like, ugh. Oh. I like it when I get a corn dog and it's still cold in the middle. Oh, hot. But it's hot on the outside. Oh, God.

You like salty sweet. You like crunchy chewy. Yes. And you like hot cold. It's like a hot fudge sundae, but a hot dog. That sounds dangerous more than anything to me. It's fine. I put a lot of stuff in those hot dogs.

No, I hate that. So, like, hey, we're all different people. And I have to accept that, like, other people don't like that idea. But, like, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. And I know there's nothing wrong with me. All right, so I'm going to give my Hank buck to, oh, gosh, those are both very good. I'm going to go with Sari because I feel like the long-lasting science implications of this strange Greenland military experiment were, you know, extremely valuable. I'm going to go with Stefan because I like the human can-do attitude of the whole thing. Yeah, that's a pretty good human can-do attitude.

Yeah, the slaves are going to build these really big high temples just so that the rich people can have some shave ice. Somebody had to draw the schematics and stuff. It's not all. I mean, it's amazing. I don't know how they figure out how to do that. It's amazing. Mostly it's that. I don't know if anybody figured out how to do anything.

I was listening to something and they were talking about how highways and bridges and stuff were built before computers. And it's like, oh, yeah. No. No. Bad idea. I was looking at my shoes earlier and I was like, that looks like a lot of work. Yeah. But like somebody had to sculpt the bottom of them.

Yeah, I was like, dude, like a lot of work. A huge amount of work went into this shoe. Even just fabric, right? Like everyone back in the day had to make leather. We had to figure out how to do that. Or weaving. Or weaving, yeah. Just like forever by hand.

No looms even. And then when they had looms, that was also very hard. And you needed special people with small fingers, a.k.a. children. Yeah, small boys. Like, let's change colors now. Okay. I'm sure I won't get stuck in this giant machine.

It'll be fine. All right. So it's time. We got to move on. It's time for Ask the Science Couch. Sam, do you have Ask the Science Couch question for us? I do. Today's Ask the Science Couch question comes from Jane Forbes.

Jane asks, can you physically build structures out of ice like buildings slash houses? Explain why it might not be possible. Oh, well, you definitely can because that's what an igloo is. Like an igloo. But can you make the ice palace from that James Bond movie? Well, there's ice hotels. There is an ice hotel. That place is real, isn't it?

Yeah. From the James Bond movie. I think that it's real. Yeah. I also know of people who've tried to build like boats out of ice slash wood slurry mixtures, which turns out to be like a sort of a temporary thing. Pycrete. Pycrete. Yeah, that's what it is.

Like wood mixed with water, frozen, and it's stronger than just ice. But it has more like flex. So like ice, you hit it and it just breaks it doesn't bend at all but this stuff has a little bit of flex before it breaks it has lower thermal conductivity too i think right that's why it doesn't melt as easily because it's not just a bunch of water molecules arranged there's wood in there too which can like be a heat sink maybe insulator insulator that's the word that i wanted yeah that's basically what I wanted to talk about because Pycrete is super weird.

Oh, you want to talk about Pycrete? I want to talk about Pycrete because for some reason, during war, we have weird ideas. Yeah. Yeah, it forces us to think like, what can we do that the others won't do? Build a boat out of wood and ice!

Yep. When is this? World War II. What? Very recently. I was thinking like Rome or something. Jeffrey Pike. I think he was British. Oh, is that why it's called Pike Reap?

That's why it's called Pike Reap. Yeah. Yeah. English journalist, educationalist, and later an inventor. What the frick is an educationalist? I don't know. That's not a thing.

I think he was just a man who liked to think and he was probably rich enough that he could just do that. That's his job. Yeah. The dream. And so when they were out of steel, he was like,

let's find a cheap substance to replace it. And he mixed water and sawdust at that point and let it freeze and made pycrete. And then eventually the British military came up with a project, Habakkuk, which is, I don't know if I'm saying it correctly. It's H-A-B-A-K-K-U-K. And wanted to create a whole aircraft carrier out of pycrete and bring it into the water, which is just amazing. carrier out of Pycrete and bring it into the water, which is just amazing. They were like, if a hole springs in it, we can just repair it by like dumping more water on it and freezing it.

It'll be fine. What keeps it cold? How would they freeze it? That was the problem. Their plan was to make refrigeration units. They were going to have basically just a bunch of air conditioners. I like the idea of bringing fans on board and just like, keep it from melting. Did they build boats out of this? They think they built like a test version of a boat. Mythbusters has also built a boat, which I love. Yeah, and Mythbusters, they built it and I think they were able to boat around for a little bit,

but then it sank eventually. Because that's the problem is keeping it cold. So are people building ice buildings oh you want to know how big of a big of an ice building before physics says no i feel like pretty big because i think ice is pretty structurally sound yeah at least in the ice hotels and not super heavy and not super heavy at all i think stuff like stairs seem like it would be trickier unless you... Everything would be very slippery. But there are ways to

bind ice together. I don't know how sturdy it is. One article called it snice because it's snow ice. I think they just coat ice bricks in sort of like a snow slurry and then that sticks them together because then when the less dense snow

squishes the bricks together and you dump a little water on, then it just freezes into a bigger ice sheet. And so I assume that's structurally sturdy enough to create ice hotels or ice mazes or whatever novelty ice structure you want to make. My biggest worry is floors and the reinforcements there. But that's why structural engineers exist

and I'm not one of those and I don't think about those problems. Well, also, it doesn't just melt. If it just gets hit by the sun, it could sublime and then you've got

a giant. It'll just always be going away a little bit. You don't want your building materials to vaporize generally. But that's probably another good thing

about that. Pie creep doesn't do that as much. So wait, to summarize, can you physically build structures out of ice? Yes. Like buildings and houses.

Yes. Why not? Explain why it might not be possible. There's no reason it's not possible. We could totally do that. It'll just disappear into thin air eventually. It will eventually. Yeah.

It's not a long-term solution. It's going to be a lot of upkeep on your home made of ice. Thanks, Drayden Forbes, for your question. And thank you, everybody, for sending in your questions. If you want to ask the Science Couch a question, you could tweet at us using the hashtag

Ask SciShow. And you can also follow us on Twitter, at SciShow, where we will occasionally ask you for topic-specific questions for just this reason. But you can ask us

any old question any old time, too. Absolutely. So, what do we got here at the end of SciShow Tangents? We got me with zero. We got Sari with zero. Oh no.

We got Sam and Stefan tied. I made you tie me. I didn't mean to do that. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. First, you can do us a review wherever you listen.

That's super helpful and helps us know what you think about the show. Second, please tweet out your favorite moment from the episode so that we can be happy that you were happy about what we did. Thank you to at PSL Eyedrops and everybody else who tweeted us your questions. And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents, you could just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I have been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Riley. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangent is a co-production between Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by us and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our art and music are by Hiroko Matsushima and Joseph Tunamedish. Our social media

organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. We couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. To survive icy ponds in winter when they can't get to the surface to breathe, some species of aquatic turtles hibernate by breathing through their butts.

Do the turtles stick their butts above the surface then? No, they just lower their metabolisms really, really far down. And they have a lot of vascularization through their cloacas. They have this whole chamber full of blood vessels. They have veiny butts? What do they suck in there? Water. They breathe the water water they breathe the

water they breathe the water and then just like remove the oxygen from the water and then squeeze it back out they have butt gills yeah it's kind of kind of cool it's called cloacal respiration which is a great science you should try it sometime i don't have one of those