North Pole Weather 3/25/13

The sun rose this morning at 7:31, and will set after 12 hours and 52 minutes, at 8:24 this evening. We’re gaining 6 minutes 44 seconds a day, and the sun on the snow near noon is blinding. I regret to say that while it may be spring officially, there is no melting in sight here. For the ice park, this in wonderful. I personally am a little tired of almost 2’ of snow still on the ground, with more snow today. (It was snowing when I went to bed last night, and by 8 this morning we’d accumulated another 3″.) Still nothing like I hear the middle of the lower 48 is getting, though the south coast of Alaska is scheduled for a foot or more.

Speaking of the ice park, I went through the Youth division Friday. This division is for artists through 18 years of age. I’d say they did a pretty good job.

Fuego, 1st place Youth division. Artists Josh Lundy and Anand
Enkhbold.

Stargate, 2nd Place Youth division. Artist Tane Timling.

Cygnus Olor, 3rd place Youth Division. Artists Joe Plett and Jed Hall.

Ice Sculpture: Places 3-5 Abstract

It’s officially the first full day of spring, but with 20″ of snow still on the ground and temperatures well below freezing it’s had to tell that from the local weather! Mainly photos today, with the rest of the multi-block abstract placers.

Singing in Unison, 3rd place abstract. Vitaliy Lednev, Russia, Mario Amegee, Monaco, Junko Yanagida, Japan, and Speareo Stephens, USA.

On My Way Home, 4th place abstract, multi-block. Tian Zuo Wei, China, Linda Heck, USA, Qun Li Mu, China, and Ling Zhi Zhang, China.

The Dream of the Sky, 5th place abstract. Sergei Zinner, Viacheslav Maksimov, Andrey Koshelev, and Evgenii Gorbunov, Russia

Breaking news: I found out just this morning that there’s an A to Z theme reveal going on, so I signed up at the last minute. My theme? I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. The format of background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. Bold type will indicate that more information has been or will be available in another A to Z post. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live at 6 pm Alaska time.

More Ice Sculptures

Photos again today, with the third through 5th places in the realistic multi-block category at the World Ice Art Championships.

Unstoppable, 3rd place realistic muti-block. Keven Laughlin, Sam Vose, David Bourdeau, Carl Eady, USA

Extreme Ice, 4th place multi-block realistic: Qi Feng An (China) Di An (China) Julio Martinez (Mexica) and Aubrey Newton(USA)

Crevasse, 5th place realistic multi-block. Anita Tabor, Jacob Harding, Gina Eaton, Greg Bartholomew, USA

Although is has not been warm enough to cause significant melting, “Foreign Object,” shown last Thursday, unfortunately lost its head in the wind storm (by Fairbanks standards) Wednesday and Thursday.

Ice Sculpture Multi-Block

Here are the top two winners in each category (realistic and abstract) of the multi-block competition of the World Ice Art Championships. I have to say some could fit either category. I am surprised (and pleased) at how well the USA did this year.

Hunting Dragons, 1st place realistic. Steve and Heather Brice and Steve and Justin Cox, USA.

Winter Breeze, 1st place abstract. Stan Kolonko,
Chris Uyehara, Jerry
Perun, and Wei Sen Liang, USA

Foreign Object, 2nd place realistic. Chris Foltz, Woojay Poynter, Jillian Howell, Amelia Rombach, USA

Hope, 2nd place abstract. Ivan Zuev,
Aleksandr Parfenov,
Mikhail Vasilenko, Eduard Ponomarenko, Russia

North Pole Weather 3/11/13

The sun will rise at 8:23 this morning – note that it’s back to future tense, thanks to daylight savings. On the other hand, with an 11 hour 18 minute day, it won’t set until 7:40 this afternoon, with solar noon at 2:01 pm. Alaska’s certainly not on sun time, and it’s even worse at Nome, where the sun sometimes doesn’t rise until afternoon.

The temperatures have been balmy to the point of being ridiculous . The highs were above freezing from Thursday through Saturday, which caused problems for the World Ice Art Championships. The single block competition was over, but the multiple block carvers were supposed to finish at 9 pm Friday. They use water to glue the pieces together, and at 42° Friday that just wasn’t possible. So Friday most of the sculptures were wrapped in Tyvek to keep the sun from melting them, and the sculptors were allowed to keep working until 11 pm.

The roads are great where the sun has melted the ice and then evaporated the water, but there is still a lot of gray ice present. When the sun shines on that, with temperatures this warm, it gets very slippery. Remember the ground is thoroughly cold-soaked, so it takes quite a lot of heating to get rid of the ice cover. I hope it stays below freezing for a while now, but I’m not hoping for extreme cold, such as sometimes follows unusual warmth.  We can reach 40 below until the end of March.

I’ll put a couple of pairs of photos side by side below. Click to get larger images. The first is Friday and Saturday views of “Winter Breeze,” an abstract  by Stan Kolenko, Chris Uyehara, Jerry Perun and Wei Sen Liang,  all of the USA. Guess I did a good job choosing; this one took first place in the abstract category.

………………….

The second is Friday and Saturday views of “Extreme Ice,” a realistic sculpture by Qi Feng An, (China) Di An, (China) Julio Martinez (Mexico) and Aubrey Newton (USA.) This one took 4th place realistic and the Governer’s Award. I’ll post photos of the winners Thursday.

Ice Art 3rd places and Multi-block Update

Here are the third place winners in the single block competition.

This one took third in the abstract category, and was so intricate it was hard to photograph.

This one’s called Water and Fire, and the artists are Ivan Zuev and Eduard Ponomarenko, from Russia.

This one’s my favorite — but you ought to know by now that I like horses!

Bullseye, by Steve and Heather Brice, USA. I think they’re local.

I went out to the ice park again yesterday, and photographed a few of the multi-block carvers in action. They’re about halfway through and while the sculptures as a whole are still anyone’s guess, some pieces are coming together. Again, click on the tumbnails if you want to see the larger versions.

More Ice Art

I’m not really writing a post today, just showing you some more ice art. This was 2nd place in the abstract category.

“Visitor of the Sun.” Tian Zuo Wei and Lin Zai Zhang, China.

2nd Place in the realistic category went to this one.

“Lion King.” Artists Victor Dagatan (Phillipines) and James Duggan (USA)

Also, I managed a photo of the 1st place “Locust” on a clear day.

“Locust.” Artists Junichi Nakamura (Japan) and Shintaro Okamoto (USA)

The multi-block carvers started their work  9 am March 3 and can work through 9 pm March 8, but I am including some thumbnails of the earliest stages of their work. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

Quilled Necklaces

Just a photo today, and with some problems — I forgot to turn off the flash, so the lighting is uneven. These are some more examples of quilling from my neighbor at the Farmers’ Market this summer.

I love the black and turquoise one in the center.

Quilling

Ever read Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility and wondered what Lucy was up to in making a filigree basket for Annabelle? I don’t mean her motive; she was obviously sucking up to Lady Middleton. But what was a filigree basket? And what did rolling papers have to do with it?

I must confess that my assumption for years was that the basket was something like crochet or tatting, with papers for temporary spacing. Then a fellow vendor at the Farmers’ Market straightened me out.

These can be worn as pendants.

She was selling quilled ornaments – Christmas ornaments, pendants, baskets of flowers – and said that there was mention of her craft in Sense and Sensibility. I tried googling Jane Austin and quilling, and found that such filigree baskets were made by gluing the rolled and shaped paper to wooden baskets or boxes.

In Jane Austin’s day, quilling was done by wrapping thin strips of paper around a

This is one of our wild Alaska flowers — fireweed.

literal quill. The roll was glued or pinched into shape, and the edge of the paper glued to the wooden base. Modern quilling can also be done with the rolls glued to other rolls to form shapes, and this is the kind my fellow vendor had for sale. The craft is popular enough that the paper strips – a little heavier than ordinary paper — can be bought precut in a variety of colors, and power tools do the rolling.

This piano shows what can be done with quilling.

I keep telling myself that I do not have room for such delicate bits of artwork – but if I see her again before the Market closes for the season, I’ll probably succumb.

Could Jarn have Made Glass?

Could Jarn really have made glass?

Sure, if his ability to heat things up with his mind was sufficient to melt the crystals in sand or rock completely. Volcanoes and lightning strikes do it all the time, producing obsidian and fulgurites, both glasses. But he wouldn’t make modern window glass by accident!

Scientifically a glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid. Most are made by melting or dissolving something which may be crystalline to start with and then cooling it so fast that crystals have no chance to form. This can be done, for instance, with sugar. In fact, sugar glass was widely used for breakaway windows in Hollywood special effects. It had to be made up on the spot, as it would absorb water from the air, but if you’ve seen a stuntman thrown through a window, the chances are that window was made of sugar.

When sand is the raw material, silicon dioxide (quartz) is usually the main ingredient. Pure or nearly pure silica sand would give silica glass, which is used when expansion or contraction with temperature would be a problem, or at high temperatures. But it is hard to make, so most modern glass has two “impurities”: soda (Na₂O) and lime (CaO). Lots of other things may be added in smaller amounts as well. If Jarn found a sand with these minerals as impurities, he could indeed have produced a crude form of what we would recognize as glass, and given his mental abilities he could have formed it into transparent sheets.

Modern fused, pressed and flameworked glass jewelry.

Why these particular impurities? Pure silica sand melts at a very high temperature. Mixing it with soda reduces that temperature—but the resulting glass, like sugar glass (though not quite to the same extent!) is water-soluble. Adding lime and a couple of other trace ingredients greatly reduces the solubility and produces greater chemical stability.

Transparency is a property of many large crystals, such as quartz, Most rocks made of silicon dioxide, such as flint or jasper, are not transparent simply because they are made up of many tiny crystals, and light reflects off the crystal boundaries. Glasses, having no crystal boundaries, are often transparent.

Lack of transparency in a glass may be due to bubbles or to the inclusion of elements which color the glass. Many sand grains, for instance, are yellow because of a coating of iron oxide. This would color glass made from yellowish sand, though the color is more green than yellow. Small amounts of various chemicals are in fact used to color glass deliberately.

So Jarn could have made glass by accident and then learned what he had done and how to refine the process from his computer. His fusing of dirt would have been more akin to firing ceramics. But these were not arts he could have taught to anyone else.