Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Ice is a liquid

According to the federal government of the United States of America*, ice is a liquid. This classification has a number of implications for Earth and planetary sciences, the study of which is often funded by the same federal government. A few of these are:

  • Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are water worlds, completely covered in ocean.
  • The various Mars probes have found unequivocal evidence for liquid water on modern Mars, both in the northern polar cap and in the subsurface below the Phoenix probe.
  • It is too late to stop anthropogenic climate change from melting Earth’s polar ice caps; they are liquid already.
  • Ice sheets and floods can’t possibly be geologically distinguishable, as they are the same process.
  • The Snowball Earth hypothesis is an exercise in semantics
  • The Titanic must have been sunk by a conspiracy theory.
* As represented by the TSA security officer at Lihue airport, Hawaii.

5 comments:

Rosie said...

Haha, good good.

Silver Fox said...

So you can only have 3 oz of ice when you board a plane?

C W Magee said...

The TSA agent asked me to chuck the frozen water bottle we were using to keep LLLL's lunch cold...

Adamooo said...

Anyone know whether two-factor explosives components can be frozen? While I think the general rule is unrealistic/impractical, I'm not sure I object to a consistent approach to enforcing it (that bottle was going to be full of water again by the end of the flight).

That said, has anyone taken blue-ice packs through TSA security?

C W Magee said...

They would freeze at vastly different temperatures than water, and probably look different as well.

And if half melted, the guy bringing them through would have to be pretty game to swig off the liquid portion in line before asking about them.

And it was only a 20 minute flight.