Montana State University freshman Chris Bade, on the left, and Bozeman High School senior Roy Crosby spent their summer growing ice in an engineering lab. (Photo by Ed Adams.)

As heat waves made mirages across Montana last summer, two Bozeman teenagers donned hats, coats and gloves to grow ice.

Montana State University freshman Chris Bade and Bozeman High School senior Roy Crosby spent six summer weeks, eight hours a day, inside a frosty College of Engineering lab at sub-freezing temperatures. Under direction from civil engineering professor Ed Adams, they grew blocks of ice to simulate Antarctic ice.

"We had to design a device that could freeze big blocks of ice that could be used for data analysis," said Bade. "We had to learn how ice works."

They experimented with temperature, timing, stirring and boiling to achieve cube clarity of the 2-by-1-by-1.5-foot blocks. They successfully created clear chunks of ice yet met some surprises.

"For the last two experiments, we boiled the water and cooled it to room temperature so no air could get back into the water," said Bade. "It resulted in these long streaking bubbles within the ice."

Adams explained that long cylindrical bubbles occur in the Antarctic lake ice.

"The bubbles may have seemed strange to the students, yet develop quite naturally," Adams said. "Gas dissolved in the water may be captured in the ice as bubbles similar to ice cubes in your freezer."

Adams had the students create large clear sections of ice for several studies but focus on simulating Antarctic ice to study a diesel spill.

In 2003, a helicopter crashed onto the frozen Lake Fryxell and spilled 193 gallons of jet fuel. Pilot and passengers survived, yet researchers questioned the consequence to the pristine environment of Lake Fryxell and the liquid lake that sits under the frozen lake.

An MSU multidisciplinary research team sought to find out what happens when fuel spills on ice at well below zero, given that diesel freezes at a much lower temperature than water. The team includes John Priscu and researchers from MSU's Land Resources and Environmental Sciences as well as Adams and Ph.D. candidate Steve Jepsen.

"The first supposition is that fluids that are lighter than water should float, but now we are looking more closely," Adams said. "We place contaminants such as fuel-saturated sand and pure fuel on ice samples then subject them to freezing temperatures and solar radiation to observe how the contaminants move through the ice."

"The ice blocks are placed in an environmental chamber where the radiation lamp and temperature is set to simulate weather conditions at Lake Fryxell in November or December," said Jepsen. "It is these times during the year when there is much internal melting and vertical motion of sediment through the lake ice."

Jepsen said that he, Bade and Crosby observed the rates at which fuel-contaminated sediment and liquid water travel down through the ice. They collected both the sediment and water, which will be submitted for hydrocarbon analyses. This will provide information used to estimate the quantities of hydrocarbons that could reach the liquid water below the ice of Lake Fryxell.

The National Science Foundation sponsors the study and is the lead U.S. organization sponsoring research in Antarctica.

Adams has created ice for 14 years for studies ranging from avalanche behavior and highway icing to the transport of frozen contaminants. Local high school students apply for the summer jobs and are chosen for their physics background, academic excellence and enthusiasm. They are paid through a grant from the Academy of Applied Sciences and the Army Research Office.

"The ice research is a real opportunity for these bright students to work in the research environment," Adams said. "Hopefully it will motivate and encourage them to consider science as an interesting and exciting career path."

Bade said that the research experience pre-heated his college career.

"The lab work made a difference for me," he said. "Coming in as a new freshman, I understand more about how the campus works, know some professors and have experience on a real experiment."

Posted for 10/6/04 by Jean Arthur