2/5/12 Bad Ideas…

I am a baron of bad ideas. But this time I had a worse idea and a worse outcome then the time I built a bacon house Stupidity was never so delicious!

But this time I really feel I outdid myself! I was particularily bored so I gathered up quite a bit of snow from the recent storm and built myself an igloo. A full sized igloo. In my basement! I am truly proud of myself. An igloo is an Inuit structure made from bricks of ice, which is made from condensed particles, as we learned in my previous post. Arbitrary alliteration aside, I left it for a few hours to prance in the snow in my bathing suit

Ladies…

I returned only to find my igloo reduced to a mere puddle of water! (and a very angry father.) I decided it was my job, nigh, my DUTY to find why this happened. I went to the internet when I found out who threw the wrench in my plans. That dasterdly mother nature!

It turns out that, to prevent your magnum opus of pointlessness that is a basement igloo from becoming a particularily cold puddle, you must keep the temperature around it above 0° Celsius(A unit of temperature) And this is when I had a very film-esque flashback to my previous study-session when I discovered water freezes into ice at that very same temperature. This caused me to have a epiphany. That the tempurature for this is the same both ways: turning from a liquid to a solid, called freezing, and turning from a solid to a liquid, called melting. These are called freezing points and melting points. I did more reasearch and found out this is because if something that is solid reaches this point, it experiences too much heat energy and the particles start bouncing off each other and it melts. but if a liquid reaches this temperature, the heat energy is lost and the particles stop bouncing around and pull together, making them a solid.

The Chart shows that the freezing point and melting point are the same tempurature.

I was glad to find the source of the melting, but not glad about the giant puddle that I had to clean! GEE THANKS MOTHER NATURE!