Wikipedia
Blue ice may refer to:
- Blue ice (glacial), created by glaciers
- Blue ice (precipitation), formed by leaky aircraft waste tanks
- Blue Ice (video game), a PC video game from Psygnosis
- Blue Ice (film), a 1992 film starring Michael Caine
- Blue Ice (ice pack), an artificial ice pack manufactured by Rubbermaid
- Blue Ice, a factory ring tone for polyphonic generation Nokia cellphones such as the Nokia 1112
- The Blue Ice, a 1948 adventure novel by Hammond Innes
- Blueice, the predecessor of the Bluefire Supercomputer
Blue ice in the context of aviation is frozen sewage material leaked mid-flight from commercial aircraft lavatory waste systems, a biowaste mixture of human waste and liquid disinfectant that freezes at high altitude. The name comes from the blue color of the disinfectant. Airlines are not allowed to dump their waste tanks in mid-flight, and pilots have no mechanism by which to do so; however, leaks can occur.
__NOTOC__ Blue ice occurs when snow falls on a glacier, is compressed, and becomes part of the glacier. Air bubbles are squeezed out and ice crystals enlarge, making the ice appear blue.
Small amounts of regular ice appear to be white because of plenty of air bubbles inside them and also because small quantities of water appear to be colourless. In glaciers, the pressure causes the air bubbles to be squeezed out increasing the density of the created ice. Large quantities of water appear to be blue, as it absorbs other colours more efficiently than blue. Therefore, a large piece of compressed ice, or a glacier, would appear blue.
The blue color is sometimes wrongly attributed to Rayleigh scattering which is responsible for the color of the sky. Rather, ice is blue for the same reason that large quantities of water are blue: it is a result of an overtone of an oxygen-hydrogen (O-H) bond stretch in water which absorbs light at the red end of the visible spectrum. In the case of oceans or lakes, some of the light, hitting the surface of water, is reflected back directly but most of it penetrates the surface interacting with its molecules. The water molecule can vibrate in different modes when light hits it. The red, orange, yellow, and green wavelengths of light are absorbed so that the remaining light is composed of the shorter wavelengths of blue and violet. This is the main reason why the ocean is blue. So, water owes its intrinsic blueness to selective absorption in the red part of its visible spectrum. The absorbed photons promote transitions to high overtone and combination states of the nuclear motions of the molecule, i.e. to highly excited vibrations.
An example of blue ice was observed in Tasman Glacier, New Zealand in January 2011.
Blue Ice is a computer game released in 1995, from Psygnosis. It is similar in design to Myst, with a sequence of screens representing the rooms in a large house, navigated by point and click. The screens are made through what appears to be a blend of grainy photography and bitmap painting. The player completes puzzles by collecting and using items. Some of the puzzles include brewing tea, dissolving gold in vitriol, finding keys, and making blue paint.
Blue Ice is a 1992 film directed by Russell Mulcahy that stars Michael Caine and Sean Young.
Usage examples of "blue ice".
Exposure to sun and wind had rendered these boulders into baroque fantasias of clear blue ice and opaque red ice, like aggregates of sapphire and bloodstone.
Raif watched as the blue ice in its eyes melted and the curled bullwhip of its tail fell flat.
Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white blue ice in the dark.
It rested on wide blue ice skids, the stem of the sleek delta-wing shape pocked with rocket and jet exhaust ports.
Spencer continued to look out at the blue ice on the black horizon.
Each day Michel woke in his cubicle and looked out of his little window (everyone had one) at the frozen surface of Lake Vanda, a flat oval of cracked blue ice, flooding the bottom of the valley.
Here the constant wind had kept the blue ice clear of dust and snow.