Ice

This post is quite topical for today: I noticed a headline " Severe cold weather heading for UK".
 We have had unusual cold here recently, which led to frozen pipes, which caused several house fires when folk tried to unfreeze their pipes with a blowtorch.

Water expands when it freezes, causing also burst pipes. Ice floats too, and our lakes freeze over in some parts. When the whole surface freezes over, the rest of the water underneath is protected, so living things can survive. It could have theoretically frozen from the bottom up. We all know the common forms of ice, snow, hail, icicles, glaciers, pack ice etc but I didn't know that ice is a mineral; that ice making machines make three different kinds, called flake, tubular, and plate; that  there are other forms called pancake ice, ice pellets,and feather ice; that the reason we can skate on ice is because the layer next to the air has a different structure, being more unstable and therefore more slippery; and that quite a few other volatile liquids can make ice, for example dry ice from carbon dioxide. There are also a total of fifteen different chemical/physical forms of ice....

Frozen Dock, Okanagan Lake. Snowing on the Hills.

Block of floating Ice (thanks to Wikipedia)

Enough said. As you can see from our first photo, there is no sailing today.( Hey! wait a minute! what about going ice-sailing on Vaseux lake?? )