Piece Description

Episode 2 - The Opportunities & Challenges of Life With Ice in the 21st Century

Ice is beautiful and complex, which makes it ideal for the different games we play on it. People who know ice, and work with it, can exploit that complexity and tailor the properties of ice to meet their exacting standards.

In sports arenas, unlike the great outdoors, the climate can be adjusted and controlled. This allows ice-makers to achieve their goal: making perfect ice for skaters, curlers and hockey players.

The art of ice-making, is based on science. Water normally freezes at zero degrees Celsius. In this new solid state, we call it “ice”. But ice is not entirely solid. There’s always a little layer of liquid water, floating on it. Water also expands as it freezes, with enough force to burst pipes and even rocks when it turns to ice. And because these molecules are less crowded (or less densely packed), ice is also lighter than water. This is why icebergs can float on water.

The Martha L. Black is a Canadian Coastguard Icebreaker that clears shipping lanes on the St. Lawrence River, just past Quebec City. Navigation is tight here. Ships, ferries and bridges loom out of the fog, and the river
is paved with ice. It could easily puncture the hull of an ordinary vessel.

Ice is magical and romantic, even when it torments us! No matter who we are, or where we live in this country, we all learn to live with ice. Assuming of course there’s ice around for us to live “with”…

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard that ice is melting around the Poles. But it turns out, there’s more to it than sea ice. Glaciers are also moving, at unprecedented speeds.
Now that it’s melting and threatens to vanish from our world, the new frontier is in outer space, which ironically is where ice came from in the first place, before it even got to earth. And so it goes…