Riddles Of A Rippled Icicle

Image by Choose_Freewill via flickr With the wintry holiday season now upon us, icicles will soon join luminous and festive decorative lights along roofs and rafters. Natural icicles are more than convenient decorations, however, for University of Toronto physicists Antony Szu-Han Chen and Stephen Morris. They are an icy enigma waiting to be solved. One riddle, in particular, is the origin of the ripple patterns that form around the circumference of icicles. By growing both smooth and rippled ic...