Frozen Oceans?

[fireinthedust]

There's an episode of Sliders (first one, I think) where they port to a frozen earth. A comet hit the planet, lots of snow, etc.

I personally don't know if there would *be* snow, at that point, because if it's that cold, where is the water to make the snow coming from? It's not evaporating, as it's too cold.

Anyway: If it was possible, say, that the Ocean was flash-frozen (and that's a lot considering it's salt water), would the shape of the ocean of ice be mountainous waves?

 

[adwyn]

Short answer is no. Ice still behaves like a liquid in many ways, just very slowly.



That being said individual icebergs locked in the ice could loom several hundred feet into the air. In the right conditions a Sargasso Sea like current could bring hundreds or even thousands of icebergs together as the open water area shrinks, giving you a mountain range far from any underlying land.

 

[Aeolius]

dibs on deep-sea fishing on Europa !

 

[Hand of Evil]

You should read the Ice Schooner Michael Moorcock or Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster.

Both had ice worlds and the oceans changed as much landscapes, you would have flat spots, rought stops, ice islands, etc.

 

[the Jester]

I imagine a frozen world with a hot core would still have the same basic geology, just different materials making up the mountains and whatnot.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Look up 'snowball earth' for some ideas e.g. Snowball Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[jonesy]

How about Ice-nine ?

 

[korjik]

There's an episode of Sliders (first one, I think) where they port to a frozen earth. A comet hit the planet, lots of snow, etc.

I personally don't know if there would *be* snow, at that point, because if it's that cold, where is the water to make the snow coming from? It's not evaporating, as it's too cold.

Anyway: If it was possible, say, that the Ocean was flash-frozen (and that's a lot considering it's salt water), would the shape of the ocean of ice be mountainous waves?

It is dependent on the actual temperature of the ice, but you would get some sublimation of the ice that then could fall as snow. It would be very small amounts, compared to what we see.

If you had the entire Earth's oceans frozen in a second, it would prolly immediately explode into fragments, since the ice would have nowhere to expand to...

If you had a frozen ocean, I think it would end up as flat plains of ice seperated by ridges of broken ice. The ridges would form along cracks in the ice caused by the need to expand when frozen, or they would be stress fractures as tectonics compressed and stretched the ice.

 

[fireinthedust]

What about a water world, like in that Voyager episode where all the oceans were sucked up into space and surrounded a machine that kept them there? If that flash-froze, would it be ball-shaped?

That last thought reminds me of this dead world someone on giantitp posted, where illithids were aquatic, swimming below the surface. I forget if the planet thawed, or if they plane-hopped to PC-land. Either way, it was a neat idea.


I suppose Magic could flash-freeze me some oceans. Like if the Prince of Winter from 4e had some device that accomplished that.

 

[jonesy]

What about a water world, like in that Voyager episode where all the oceans were sucked up into space and surrounded a machine that kept them there? If that flash-froze, would it be ball-shaped?

How did the machine keep it there? Was it keeping the water ball shaped? If it wasn't, then not really:
Liquid in Space Video by Jake - Myspace Video

And in the vacuum of space, provided it was getting hit by starlight, it would boil, then freeze. And you'd need to be pretty deep in intergalactic space for something to totally freeze at any measure of fast (and it would still take hours in the best case scenario).