Suddenly Thereās A Meadow In The Ocean With āFlowersā Everywhere
They arenāt flowers, of course. They are more like ice sculptures that grow on the border between the sea and air. On Sept. 2, 2009, the day Jeffās colleague Matthias Wietz took these pictures, the air was extremely cold and extremely dry, colder than the ocean surface. When the air gets that different from the sea, the dryness pulls moisture off little bumps in the ice, bits of ice vaporize, the air gets humid ā but only for a while. The cold makes water vapor heavy. The air wants to release that excess weight, so crystal by crystal, air turns back into ice, creating delicate, feathery tendrils that reach sometimes two, three inches high, like giant snowflakes. The sea, literally, blossoms.
ā¦.But as beautiful as they are, scientists prize frost flowers because they are so salty. These blossoms suck up seawater, concentrate the salt and have three times the salinity of the ocean. You could think of them asĀ beautiful pickles.
Which is why it would be surprising to find anything alive in these things. But here comes the surprise. āIf you take a frozen flower and let it melt,ā and thatās what Jeff and his colleagues didĀ what you get is about āone to two milliliters of water,ā Jeff told me. Thatās a wee small, very salty puddle.
And yet, he says,Ā when he and colleagues checked, they found each frost flower housed about a million creatures. āThatās 10 to the sixth! Yeah, a million bacteria.ā
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