Ice and cold

Seagulls, going with the floe. Counter-current
cooling stops their feet from freezing.

… the degree 48 … in my thermometers holds the middle place between the limit of the most intense cold obtained artificially in a mixture of water, of ice and of sal-ammoniac or even of sea-salt, and the limit of the heat which is found in the blood of a healthy man.
— Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit (1686 – 1736), Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 33, 1734, 1.

Water may polish the rocks, but it nowhere leaves straight scratches upon their surface; it may furrow them, but these furrows are sinuous, whilst glaciers smooth and level uniformly, the hardest parts equally with the softest, and like a hard file, rub to uniform continuous surfaces the rocks upon which they move.
— Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873)

Australasia, in common with Europe and North America, had its ‘Glacial Epoch’ during the Pleistocene Period. On the mainland of Australia the refrigeration of the climate was only of sufficient amount to produce glacial conditions over one very small area, viz., the Kosciusko tableland.
— C. A. Süssmilch, An Introduction to the Geology of New South Wales, Third edition, Angus and Robertson, 1922, pages 218-219.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

On careful consideration it became apparent that the proper way of attacking the problem [of storing liquefied gases] was to conduct a series of experiments on the relative amounts of heat conveyed to boiling liquid gases; firstly, by means of the convective transference of heat by the gas particles, and, secondly, by radiation from surrounding bodies. The early experiments of Dulong and Petit on the laws of radiation [when they were determining specific heats] had proved the very important part played by the gas particles surrounding a body in dissipating heat otherwise than by pure radiation. In the year 1873, I used a highly-exhausted vessel in calorimetric experiments … it naturally occurred to me that the use of high vacua surrounding the vessels containing liquid gases would be advantageous. In order to arrive at definite data, some means of conducting comparative experiments between the amounts of convective and radiant heat at such low temperatures had to be devised …
— Sir James Dewar (1842 – 1923), in a talk given to the Royal Institution in 1893.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.