These birds are walking on an extremely thin sheet of ice. Now they don't weigh much, but still, that ice is maybe 2mm thick. Here's a question for the engineers out there: how much support does the unfrozen water beneath the ice provide? Certainly the ice can hold more weight if it's floating on water, right? But water is an incompressible fluid. I suggest pondering this one over a nice hygge mug of hot cocoa.Friday, February 9, 2007
Birds on Ice
These birds are walking on an extremely thin sheet of ice. Now they don't weigh much, but still, that ice is maybe 2mm thick. Here's a question for the engineers out there: how much support does the unfrozen water beneath the ice provide? Certainly the ice can hold more weight if it's floating on water, right? But water is an incompressible fluid. I suggest pondering this one over a nice hygge mug of hot cocoa.
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The answer to your quandary about the ice is highly dependent on weather or not the ice is "floating." If your patch of ice is isolated in a body of water (like an iceberg) the support provided by the water is just the force of buoyancy: the weight of the water displaced by the ice minus the total weight of the ice (and anything on top of it). The apparent incompressibility of water would only be a factor if the ice perfectly sealed over the body of water and if the ice is assumed to be completely rigid. In this case, the added support you would get would be determined by how much pressure your seal at the shoreline could hold before the water started leaking out.
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