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The planned expedition led by Norwegian Jarle Andhoy was already shady, and now there’s an unwilling member along for the ride. The yacht took off in a hurry as immigration officials arrived to investigate Andhoy at an Auckland harbor, while a mechanic was on board repairing an anchor on the 52-foot boat Nilaya.
Mr Andhoy and three crew members have embarked on an unpermitted voyage to Antarctica’s Ross Sea, in defiance of both the Norwegian and New Zealand governments.
A previous trip he made to Antarctica almost a year ago ended in disaster when his yacht Berserk sank in a fierce storm and three men died.
Declaring himself “a Viking”, the Norwegian adventurer says he is seeking the wreckage of the Berserk, which was serving as a supply ship for an attempt to reach the South Pole on quad bikes.
New Zealand authorities, who co-ordinated an extensive search and rescue operation last year in which Mr Andhoy and a companion were airlifted to safety, are furious about his return voyage.
Authorities are looking for the Nilaya, which Andhoy has said does not have a locator beacon. It is assumed to not have adequate provisions for an extra expedition member, either. Link -via Arbroath
The famed Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen had a nose ring. It’s true! This video shot and produced in Antarctica by people living there (Antarcticans?) proves it! Take an intoxicated journey into the early history of Antarctic exploration in the style of Derek Waters’s Drunk History series. Content warning: foul language.
– Thanks to Laura Omdahl on Ross Island!
When
Douglas MacAyeal at the University of Chicago gave undergraduate science
interns the boring task of digitizing satellite photos of Antarctic lakes,
little did he know that he would stumble upon a neat geographical curiosity:
the lakes don't stay put - in fact, they
move rapidly along the coastline.
MacAyeal thinks the explanation lies in the unusual location of the George VI ice shelf, trapped as it is in a narrow channel between Alexander Island and the Antarctic mainland. As the ice sheet squeezes through the channel, its outer edges buckle into a series of crests and troughs. The lakes sit in the troughs. The ice shelf pushes into Alexander Island at an oblique angle, so the end of each trough tracks along the coast, dragging its lake with it.
The marathon is brutal enough as it is normally conducted. Remember that Pheidippides, the first marathon runner, died at the end. Now imagine completing one in sub-zero temperatures through the snow. That’s what thirty-six runners did at the Union Glacier Antarctic base camp. The winner, Clément Thévenet, finished the race in three hours and forty-seven minutes.
Link (warning: auto-sound) | Previously: North Pole Marathon
It is summer now in Antarctica, and the giant salmon are running -as you can see. Sandwichgirl recently took a few photographs of the fish, which are curated in a Flickr set. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Flickr user sandwichgirl)
Scientists in Antarctica used a time-lapse camera to capture the formation of a brinicle — an icicle made from brine. As the salty water sank, it froze, forming a spike of brine down to the seafloor. As it grew over several hours, the brinicle killed everything in its path, including numerous unlucky starfish.
Link -via Geekosystem
There are no landfills for garbage in Antarctica, at least none near McMurdo Station, the American research outpost. Therefore, recycling is a serious endeavor, with a very extensive list of items to be recycled. Still, the residents have a sense of humor and added some “extra” bins for even more stuff to be recycled! See more at Boing Boing. Link
(Image credit: Henry Kaiser)
We knew the Occupy Wall Street movement was widespread when we saw it had reached the Arctic tundra, but now it has been confirmed on the other end of the world as well! The protests have officially reached all seven continents. Link -via The Daily What
Forget
Happy Feet - these
criminal penguins have Sticky Hands ... er, make that Sticky Beaks:
A "criminal" stone-stealing Adelie penguin has been captured on camera by a BBC film crew.
The team, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.
The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.
The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.
Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized.
Emperor penguins huddle together to keep warm over winter. They’ve developed their own system for making sure each penguin gets a chance to stand in the middle of the huddle and then rotate to the outside and give another a spot. The result resembles a crowd doing the wave! -via Buzzfeed
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If you stand at the South Pole and walk in any direction, you’d be walking north, wouldn’t you? So how do people in Antarctica read a map or give directions? Minnesotastan looked it up, and the answer is: they throw out the directions from the globe and make up a system. The continent is labeled with “East Antarctica” and “West Antarctica” in this map, but of course you must go south to get to either. There are actually two conventions for mapping the continent, as you’ll read in this post at TYWKIWDBI. Link
Over at In Focus, the news photography blog for the website The Atlantic, they have recently added 47 amazing photos of Antarctica – “its environment, and some of the scientific work taking place there”.
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Bouvet Island is 1,700 miles from Antarctica, and further away from anywhere else. The island is a volcano covered with a glacier. The few expeditions to explore it were many years apart, and some of those explorers never set foot on Bouvet Island, since there is no safe place to land. But in 1964, a South African expedition spent less than an hour on the island and found …an abandoned boat.
It was a mystery worthy of a Sherlock Holmes adventure. The boat, which Crawford described as “a whaler or ship’s lifeboat,” must have come from some larger ship. But no trade route ran within a thousand miles of Bouvet. If it really was a lifeboat, then, what ship had it come from? What spectacular feat of navigation had brought it across many miles of sea? How could it have survived a crossing of the Southern Ocean? There was no sign it had ever borne a mast and sail, or engine, but the solitary pair of oars that Crawford found would barely have been adequate to steer a heavy, 20-foot boat. Most unnervingly of all, what had become of the crew?
It was another two years before anyone else went to the island, and the boat was never recorded to have been seen again. Mike Dash set out to research what the boat was doing on such an isolated island, and came up with some interesting theories. However, a definitive answer has yet to be found. Read the whole story at A Blast from the Past. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
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Photo: Jodie Smith
Australia’s ABC News Onlin reporter Karen Barlow (Twitter @kjbar) went aboard the icebreaker Aurora Australis on a journey to Antarctica when she came across this bit of oddity: a piece of wood sitting atop a floating iceberg.
I’ve heard the Southern Ocean attracts a hardy individual but a block of wood on an iceberg is ridiculous.
This lonely piece of timber was spotted on the top of a small berg at 66 degrees south, just north of Commonwealth Bay.
Wildlife watchers near Aurora Australis’ bridge first thought it was a relaxing seal but it was soon apparent it was rectangular in shape.
How it got to such a prominent position, instead of just floating around, is anyone’s guess.
So, how do you think it got there? Link
Photo: Fred Bruenjes
What would the total eclipse of the sun look like from the end of the world? It would look exactly like the photo above:
In 2003, the Sun, the Moon, Antarctica, and two photographers all lined up in Antarctica during an unusual total solar eclipse. Even given the extreme location, a group of enthusiastic eclipse chasers ventured near the bottom of the world to experience the surreal momentary disappearance of the Sun behind the Moon.
One of the treasures collected was the above picture — a composite of four separate images digitally combined to realistically simulate how the adaptive human eye saw the eclipse.
As the image was taken, both the Moon and the Sun peaked together over an Antarctic ridge. In the sudden darkness, the magnificent corona of the Sun became visible around the Moon.
Quite by accident, another photographer was caught in one of the images checking his video camera. Visible to his left are an equipment bag and a collapsible chair.
From the incomparable Astronomy Picture of the Day: Link
Oceanographers glued sensors to 57 seals and used their natural movements as a means of gathering information about Antarctic ocean conditions:
As the animals swim, the tags record information every few seconds, then relay it via satellite once the seals surface. About 30 percent of the time seals dive all the way to the bottom to forage for food, says Padman, so by studying enough dives for each animal — some 200,000 dives in total — the researchers can deduce where the seafloor lies.[...]
Other researchers might now be inspired to dig through seal data to see what features could be mapped, he adds. Ships can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day to operate in Antarctic waters, whereas there is a wealth of readily available information available on seal tags.
Link via Super Punch | Photo: Daniel Costa
Buildings are buildings are buildings … except when they’re in Antarctica, where the extreme environment make them look like futuristic spaceships that land on a desolate, frozen landscape.
Oobject has a neat gallery of antarctic architecture:
Antarctic architecture provides imagery of the closest thing that people will be able see to a moon base, within their lifetimes. The extreme nature of the environment combined with its bizarre statelessness, provides the location for a freezing architectural expo, with each country having its own icy pavilion.
Since the early days of wooden huts, the architecture has converged on a style which consists of a pod on legs, somewhat reminiscent of Thunderbird II’s cargo bay or the Space 1999 freighter. In addition large scale experiments such as the south pole telescope or ice cube neutrino detector (which is technically a telescope at the north pole since it watch for particles which have traveled through the earth) provide equally interesting accidental architecture, in that their designs are purely functional.
This one above is the Halley VI Survey Station by Titan Hydraulics, who noted:
Work can only be carried out during this period when there is almost constant daylight and temperatures climb to -20° C and above. During the remaining months the environment is too inhospitable with little daylight and regular blizzards with temperatures dropping below -40°C.
Google Street View began in 2007 with images from 5 U.S. cities. Now the project is starting its photographic mapping of Antarctica:
Three years later, we’re happy to announce that you can now explore Street View imagery on all seven continents, with the addition today of Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica. You can now see images from around the world spanning from the beaches of Brazil, to the moors of Ireland, to the icy terrain in Antarctica.
Link and Antarctic Maps via DVICE | Image: Google
Widgett of Need Coffee interviewed a manager with Wells Fargo and confirmed that there are two ATMs at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. David Parker said that they were installed around the year 2000 and are largely maintained by the staff because Wells Fargo can only visit once every two years:
We do send a vendor down about once every two years to do some preventative hardware maintenance on both of the ATMs, to make sure they’re operational, change out the belts and that kind of stuff, provide new cartridges…anything else hardware-wise that we would need to make sure that it runs. But as you can imagine getting somebody down there is quite a feat.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Need Coffee
Those who work in the freezing weather of Antarctica are already members of a very exclusive club, but with an initiation stunt, they can join an even more exclusive club. The traditional “nudie run” takes a slightly different shape for different nationalities, according to Dr. Chris Cormick.
He said Australians based at all three stations, Davis, Casey and Mawson, take part in the traditional “Bliz Run”, which obliges the loser of any bet or dare to strip off and run a lap of the accommodation block.
“It’s only about 100m, but even 10m would seem like a long run in the conditions,” Dr Cormick said.
New Zealanders at their summer station go skinny dipping in Lake Vanda, with a plunge in the chilly water earning membership of the Royal Lake Vanda Swim Club.
The group is rumoured to include former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark, who gained membership before she was elected.
Americans at the Amundsen-Scott base can regularly be seen emerging from the sauna to run a naked lap of the South Pole.
The deed earns membership of the 300 Club, but only if it’s done when temperatures have plunged to below -100F.
“The idea is to run from the 200F sauna, outside, so they go through 300 degrees (F) in seconds,” Dr Cormick said.
The nude pictured is an American. Link -via Fark
Considering the small population of the continent, Antarctica has a lot of abandoned settlements. In such extremely low temperatures, it is much easier to leave structures and possessions behind than to take them with you when you leave. Harsh conditions also preserve what is left, since bacteria and mold that break down materials elsewhere on earth can’t survive in Antarctica. Camps and settlements abandoned 100 years ago still sit, appearing just as they did when they were in use. The hut shown was left by Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1909. See and read about ten of these places at WebUrbanist. Link
(Image credit: Noah Stryker)
International Penguin Day occurs on April 25, but don’t confuse this day, which marks the start of the Antarctic penguins migration period, with Penguin Awareness Day, which takes place on January 20. There seems to be no reason for the date of Penguin Awareness day, but International Penguin Day was started years ago when researchers in the Naval Weapons Center in California first observed the migration patterns of Antarctic penguins.
Personally, I can’t think of anyway to celebrate my favorite birds in all their formal-wearing glory then to go into a little detail about the birds and their fascinating lives. While the holiday marks the migration period of Antarctic penguins, we at Neatorama don’t like to discriminate, so we’ll be talking about all penguins in general rather than focusing on just those from the very far south.
Almost every wild penguin lives somewhere in the southern hemisphere with the exception of the Galapagos Penguin, which lives in the area it is named for. While many people envision penguins living in frigid conditions, only a few actually live so far south and many live in rather temperate zones. For the most part, the larger penguins live in cooler areas and smaller ones live closer to the equator.
Rock Hopper Penguin image via Ben Tubby [Flickr]
That’s not how it’s always been though. Prehistoric species of penguins were sprawled across the southern hemisphere with no distribution based on size. One giant penguin species lived only 1250 miles south of the equator. Prehistoric Penguins were so different in size that there was even a 6 foot tall penguin called the Nordenskjoeld’s Giant Penguin and a 173 pound species called the New Zealand Giant Penguin.
These days though, the largest species of penguin is Emperor Penguin, which grows to around 3 and a half feet tall and 75 pounds. These are arguably the most famous penguins around as they are not only the largest, but some of the small handful of penguins that live in Antarctica. You may remember these guys as the stars of March of the Penguins.
The species is also unique for being the only penguin to breed in the middle of the harsh Antarctic winter at temperatures as low as -40 degrees. They are also the only penguins that leave the incubation duties to only one sex and one of only two species to lay only one egg at a time –most deliver two at a time. The females lay an egg and then the males incubate the egg on their feet while the females return to the sea over the next two months to feed. The males huddle in a large circle and rotate each individual’s time in the center.
When the eggs hatch, the males have normally fasted for over 115 days. When the mom’s return, the males leave the new-born chick with their partner and take their turn to go feed. When the chicks are strong enough, they huddle amongst themselves for warmth while the mothers and fathers feed and eventually they begin to grow their adult feathers and join the feeding process around the summer time.
While all penguin species have a somewhat high mortality rate amongst the young, Emperor Penguins have the highest rate of death during the chick’s first year. In fact, 90% of all of the chicks will die during this time.
Image via ianduffy [Flickr]
On the other side of the spectrum is the Little Blue Penguin (a.k.a. the Fairy Penguin), which grows only 16 inches tall and weighs a little over 2 pounds. These little ones are much less famous than their massive Emperor cousins, even so, you may recognize these little ones as the inspiration for the Linux logo –the creator of Linux was bitten by a Little Penguin while in Australia and the memory stayed with him through his life.
Because they are so small, they are not well adapted to frigid weather and they instead live in Australia and New Zealand and do better in areas free from cats and foxes. They have also been spotted in Chile and South Africa, but researchers aren’t sure if they are part of a colony or somehow ended up in the countries.
Little Blue Penguin image via CrazyCh3m [Flickr]. Linux image via Larry Ewing
Penguins tend to be monogamous each year, but they will often find a new mate each consecutive year. In species such as the Emperor Penguin, the lack of year-to-year monogamy (only a 15% rate) is believed to be due to environmental pressures that limit the amount of time they have to search for their past partners. Some of the penguins in warmer climates, like the Little Blue Penguin, do stay loyal to their partners until one of the mates dies.
Females are the ones who select their mating partner and in many cases, females will compete for an attractive male partner.
As for the eggs themselves, penguins have some o the smallest proportioned eggs of all birds when compared with the size of the parents. The Little Blue Penguin lays eggs that are only 4.7% of its weight and the Emperor Penguin’s eggs are only 2.3% of their total weight. The eggs also have some of the thickest shells, which weigh between 10-16% of the egg’s weight (it takes the Emperor Penguin chicks about 2-3 days to hatch out of their shells) and they have some of the largest yolk ratios of all birds –the yolk takes up 22-31% of the egg volume.
Image via Jerzy Strzelecki [Wikipedia]
Aside from mating, penguins have a very high level of social interaction and all penguins communicate through visual and vocal displays. Their vocal calls not only help the penguins choose mates, but also lets them find their mate and their nest when they come back from feeding. The penguin females often show a great level of empathy for one another; when one mother loses a chick, she will often attempt to take one from another’s nest, but many of the nearby females will usually help defend the mother.
Penguins have a lot of human friends and all species are protected even though some species are at no risk of extinction in the near future. Perhaps part of the reason we connect with the birds, besides their inherent adorableness, is the fact that they are rarely afraid of humans.
Many species of penguins, particularly those from the Antarctic, have no fear of humans at all because they have so few predators on land. While seals attack by the water, the few air and land predators penguins sea will only eat chicks and eggs. For this reason, people who visit penguin habitats are often surprised to see the birds will often approach them out of pure curiosity.
This comes in handy in zoo and research facilities because the researchers can often get close to the birds without having to worry about throwing off the animal’s natural behavior patterns.
For one specific African penguin living at the California Academy of Sciences, this met an additional benefit when he started to go bald, which left him shivering in his tank. The keepers first tried to warm Pierre up with a heat lamp, but he still couldn’t enter the water, which is a major part of any penguins life (most species spend anywhere from 50-70% of their lives in the water). Eventually, one of the biologists, Pam Schaller, realized that if wet suits keep humans warm in frigid temperatures, it might just work for little Pierre. The modified suit worked brilliantly and Pierre was quite happy to have his life back as he frolicked with his 19 friends in the tank’s pool.
Image via Roux [Wikipedia]
The reason poor Pierre was so cold when he started losing his feathers comes down to a unique aspect of penguin anatomy. The birds aren’t kept warm with a layer of blubber (although the Emperor Penguins are benefited by being so large), but mostly by their waterproof feathers. The feathers trap air, which insulates their body and helps them to float.
While they can’t use their wings to fly, they instead work as flippers and penguins are great swimmers accordingly. Their style of swimming looks surprisingly like flight in other birds and they can reach speeds of 17 miles per hour, although most stay closer to 5 miles per hour during their swims. Most penguins do not swim very deeply and only dive for a minute or two, but the Emperor Penguin has been recorded going as deep as 1,800 feet for up to 22 minutes. No matter how deep they swim though, penguins have to return to the surface to breathe and most of the smaller species will leap in and out of the water like porpoises to breathe.
While underwater, penguins occasionally play, but they mostly swim to eat. Their main sources of food are krill, fish and squid. While it seems like their stark color contrasts would make them an easy target for underwater predators, since they largely stay near the top of the water surface, all the underwater predators (like orcas, seals, sea lions and sharks) can see is a white belly, which blends in with the water surface. From above, their dark backs help them blend in with the depths of the sea.
Penguin’s eyes are well adapted for seeing under water as, well as the rest of their bodies. In fact, a supraorbital gland allows them to filter excess salt from their blood stream and release it from their nasal passages.
In a way, it’s quite fortunate that penguins have so few predators in the land and air. When they cruise on the land, their wings and tails help them keep balance, but they waddle quite a bit. Many penguins will also toboggan along the snow to help them move quickly and with minimal energy.
Image via ken2754@Yokohama [Flickr]
Sources: Discovery, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, Seaworld
For 26 years straight, New Zealand has defeated the US in rugby to win the Ross Island Cup. But these aren’t professional rugby players -they are scientists and support staff who live and work in Antarctica! The national team back home in New Zealand are the All Blacks, but the team from Scott Base goes by the name Ice Blacks. The US team from McMurdo Station, well, most of them don’t even know how to play rugby before they are recruited for the annual game. Yesterday’s game is recounted in embarrassing detail at Discover Magazine. Link
See the New Zealand Antarctic team performing their customary haka in this video from a few years ago. Link
(image credit: Chaz Firestone)
The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust is restoring the shack used by explorer Ernest Shackleton during his Anarctic expedition of 1907-1909. In 2006 they discovered two cases of whisky, but only recently have they been able to free those crates from the ice. Then they discovered another case of whisky and two crates of brandy! Although the crates and most of the contents must remain with the historical site, a sample of the whisky will be retrieved for the distiller.
Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte & Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay’s whisky for Shackleton, described the find as “a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers”.
He added: “If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history.
Link -via Arbroath, where’ll you’ll find a video report.
The temperature at Russia’s Vostok research station in Antarctica read -128.6F (-89.2 C) during the winter of 1983. This is the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth. The winter temperature at Vostok averages a mere -54F. Why the mercury dipped so low has puzzled scientists for 26 years.
But scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in Russia were able to solve the mystery with a computer model developed to simulate the future evolution of the Antarctic climate, along with weather charts and satellite imagery of the area.
They found that relatively warm air that normally flows over the Southern Ocean onto the high Antarctic plateau almost came to a halt during this period. A flow of cold air circling Vostok was preventing the mixing of this warmer air from lower latitudes, isolating the station and causing near optimum cooling conditions.
Adding to this was the absence of a heat-trapping cloud cover and the presence of a layer of tiny particles of ice suspended in the air (known as diamond dust), allowing more heat from the continent’s icy surface to be lost to space.
Fifty years ago today, twelve nations signed The Antarctic Treaty, regulating research activity, economic exploitation, and territorial claims in Antarctica. To mark this occasion, Annie C. Lee of Fast Company has compiled eleven interesting facts about the frozen continent:
3. Antarctica’s biggest population center is the U.S.-operated McMurdo Station. In the summer, the community can swell to more than 1,000 people; this past winter, there were just 153.
4. Antarctica’s two-letter Internet suffix is “.aq.” Internet access is via satellite; a dish on Black Island provides 10-MB-per-second service to McMurdo.
5. Tourism is one of Antarctica’s two main industries. Antarctica had 37,858 tourists last year. Most visitors arrived by sea — a typical 10-day cruise to the region runs from $5,000 to $10,000 per person — and nearly all landed on the Antarctic Peninsula. No ship carrying more than 500 passengers may land in Antarctica.
Link | Antarctic Treaty | Image: NASA
A group of explorers from New Zealand are traveling to a campsite of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1909 Antarctic expedition in the hopes of finding whiskey left behind beneath the floorboards of a shelter:
Among the supplies British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton abandoned on his unsuccessful 1909 expedition to the pole were two crates of the now extinct rare old brand of McKinlay and Co whisky.
Now Whyte & Mackay, the drinks giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked for a sample of the drink for a series of experiments, the Telegraph newspaper reported in London.
The New Zealanders will use special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the crates, discarded near the Cape Royds hut used by the Nimrod expedition, or at least draw off a sample using a syringe.
The crates were discovered in January 2006, but the bottle couldn’t be removed as they were too deeply embedded.
Link via Discover | Image: NASA
National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen is one lucky man. Not only did he get to swim and take photos of a 12-foot leopard seal in the Antarctic (and didn’t get eaten), he was actually "adopted" by it!
I slipped into the water, terrified of what might happen, and I swam up to this leopard seal. My legs were shaking and I had dry mouth. Right away she dropped the penguin. She came up to me and she opened her mouth … and her head is twice as wide as a grizzly bear’s head. She’s huge. She took my whole head and my camera inside her head and did this threat display.
But then the most remarkable thing happen. She went off and got me a live penguin. She came up and she started to feed me a penguin. She kept letting these live penguins go and the penguin would shoot past me and she’d look disgusted as she go by me. She did this over and over.
And then I think she realized that I was this useless predator in her ocean, probably going to starve to death and I think she became quite panicked and she got me weak penguins then dead penguins …
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Photo: Icebridge (NASA)
Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, and that’s with all of its ice. There is a land mass beneath, which looks like this. Twitter user Icebridge made this image to illustrate just how large our most unvisited continent actually is.
Conversely, “it is estimated that at any given time there are (only) 1,000 people ‘living’ in Antarctica, but this varies depending on the season.” (from Answerbag.)
Absolute Zero is Cool T-Shirt – just $9.95 over at Neatorama’s Online Store
There’s not many absolutes in science, so absolute zero – the coldest temperature theoretically possible where entropy is reduced to zero – truly stands out. Indeed, things get really, really weird quantum mechanically as we approach absolute zero. Let’s take a look at what fun we can have going down the thermometer all the way to 0 Kelvin.
Let’s begin with the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica. The temperatures there reach a minimum of about -80 °C (-112 °F) in the winter, with the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.2 °C (-128.6 °F).
In 2006, Anthony and Christine Powell of Frostbytes blog (fantastic photos there, by the way) recorded this video clip of what people in Antarctica consider a terrible weather (euphemistically called "Condition 1") at the McMurdo Station. So, next time you’re having some terrible winter weather where ever you are, just remember this video clip.
Purdue’s Senior System Engineer George Goble hated waiting for his BBQ to light. So, in 1995, he decided to find the fastest way to achieve barbecue ignition. He tried propane, acetylene torches, and even oxygen-fuel gas or racing fuel (the last one took 30 seconds). But that wasn’t fast enough – he wanted to set the world record of fastest ignition. (Source)
So Goble decided to get serious and reached for liquid oxygen (LOX, boiling point: 90.2 K or -183 °C). He doused 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) onto 60 pounds of charcoal and a smoldering cigarette*. Within 3 seconds about 40 pounds of the charcoal burned and the grill was vaporized.
For his creativity, George won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also attracted the attention of the West Lafayette, Indiana fire department who warned him never to repeat the stunt ever again.
*Actually it’s good that he had a lit cigarette in the pile. Pouring LOX onto unlit charcoal will cause it to explode at about the force of one stick of dynamite per charcoal. If you spill LOX on asphalt, it can detonate. Oh, did we mention that LOX is a rocket fuel? (The orange external tank of the Space Shuttle is filled with it.) Needless to say, don’t try this at home.
Nitrogen becomes liquid at 77 K (-196 °C), which is pretty darn cold. Liquid Nitrogen or LN2 is actually a very useful substance: it’s used in the laboratory to freeze things, in hospitals as a medical treatment to freeze and remove warts and skin lesions, and even in restaurants to make alcoholic ice cream.
Wait – make alcoholic ice cream? Yes, it turns out though you can’t freeze alcohol in the freezer (not cold enough), you can do so with liquid nitrogen. Here’s Ferran Adria, Head Chef of elBulli Restaurant using liquid nitrogen to make alcohol sorbets and frozen pistachio puree truffles. Yum!
Going down the temperature scale, we have liquid hydrogen at 20.28 K (-252.87°C). Liquid Hydrogen is good for one thing: fuel. It is a component of rocket fuel, and a perennial contender of zero-emission fuel (I’m looking at you, BMW H2R!)
Liquid hydrogen is used in one of the coolest (literally!) rocket engines ever created by NASA. Here’s the Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine ("CECE" for short), which generates a scalding 5,000 degree steam and a whopping 13,000 lb of thrust yet form icicles at the rim of its nozzle at the same time. It’s quite the fire and ice engine:
CECE is fueled by a mixture of -297 F liquid oxygen and -423 F liquid hydrogen. The engine components are super-cooled to similar low temperatures–and that’s where the icicles come from. As CECE burns its frigid fuels, hot steam and other gases are propelled out the nozzle. The steam is cooled by the cold nozzle, condensing and eventually freezing to form icicles around the rim. (Source)
Things get really, really strange with liquid helium. First of all, it’s the only element that remains liquid down to absolute zero (though you can solidify it with great pressure). It has two form of liquid phases – at 4.2K (-268.95 °C), helium-4 (an isotope of helium) becomes liquid. At 2.17 K, it turns into a superfluid.
And the fun begins: superfluid is weird – it has zero viscosity (a measure of friction for fluids), zero entropy, and infinite thermal conductivity. If a superfluid is placed in an open container, it will creep up the sides and flow over the top. If you rotate the container from stationary, the superfluid inside will never move.
And weirder still: if you place a capillary tube in a pool of superfluid, then shine light on it, you’ll get a frictionless fountain that will flow forever (no friction*, remember?)
*Actually, in bulk fluid, superfluid does have some viscosity whereas in capillary it has no viscosity. Scientists think the explanation of this paradox is that superfluid is composed of two components – the normal component, and the superfluid component. I told you it’s strange.
Quick: what’s the coldest object in space? A frozen comet or a chilly gas cloud? Nope, the coldest object in space is actually a manmade object – the Planck Telescope – launched by the European Space Agency.
As part of experiments to measure the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow of the Big Bang to you and me), the Planck Telescope is cooling its instruments to -273.05 °C or 0.1 °C above absolute zero.
But what about the coldest natural object in space? That title belongs to the Boomerang Nebula (aka the Bow Tie Nebula). The protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth has been spewing ultracold gas for 1,500 years. This cooled down the nebula to a mere 1 K above absolute zero (Source).
Boomerang Nebula, credit: European Space Agency/NASA
In 2003, Nobel Laureate Wolfang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the coolest man-made substance on Earth: they cooled a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 picoKelvin (0.00000000045 K).
In 2009, Tauno Knuuttila and colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology’s Low Temperature Lab used magnetic refrigeration (yes, using magnets to cool things down – ain’t physics interesting?) to cool rhodium to 100 pK (technically, it’s the temperature for nuclear spin, not its overall thermal energy).
Now that’s cold!
