Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer | Hacker News Reader

Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer

nytimes.com

I learned a new word! "The gelid interior keeps any melting to a trickle." Gelid means "Very cold; icy or frosty". Google n-grams says it's used with a frequency about 2-3% that of "frigid."

There's a company named Gelid that makes computer heatsinks and fans, they touted their German engineering so I just assumed it was a German word or family name. Know it makes more sense, neat!

It comes from the same word, gelum, Latin for frost, which also gives us "gelatin" and "gelato".

"Cold", on the other hand, comes from Germanic roots (Proto-Germanic kaldaz.)

They both come from the Proto-Indo-European root gel-/gol- "cold".

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cold&allowed_in_fra...

I had heard this word before [1]. So there were some benefits to spending all of high school playing Everquest.

[1] http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=5461

Like how I leaned "quaff" due to Rogue, or (to a lesser extent) how I learned to spell "anonymous" due to ftp!

Trashkrete

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

I was thinking the same thing: particulate matter is helping it stay together longer. Pykrete is hard to melt too.

Before powered refrigeration was widely available in the U.S., companies would cut gigantic blocks of ice out of northern lakes during the winter, and ship them down south to be stored in warehouses, often covered in wood chips for insulation. They would last a very long time, even in hot summers.

In nature, I think most people have heard of glaciers, which are accumulations of ice that last through the summer and into the next winter. (That's the definition of a glacier, as opposed to a snowfield.) There is type of glacier called a "rock glacier" that appears on its surface to be a talus field, but it flows like a glacier. When I reviewed the research in college (a long time ago, now), no one knew for sure whether rock glaciers were a rock/ice matrix the whole way through, or whether it was a core of pure ice with a thick layer of rock/ice matrix near the surface.

Long story short: it takes a lot of energy to melt a significant accumulation of ice!

There was a five-story pile of snow on the MIT campus after the last storm:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/02/13/residents-stude...

At one point people were skiing down it, but I can't find the video.

Another interesting phenomenon was the appearance of specialized equipment for removing ice and snow from trolley and train tracks. This device is basically a jet engine (I believe taken from a Korean-war era jet) mounted on a maintenance car and pointed at the tracks:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...

Just to re-iterate something amazing: while this snow farm is the largest and most famous, there were many others in and around Boston. Until you see one in person, it's hard to wrap your mind around the size even while you're standing there in, say, June (for the mound farm nearest me). I don't think this seaport one will last through the summer, but I can see why some people are making that bet.

I'm convinced this one won't last through summer. The article shows the pile 12 feet high, and today it's smaller - https://twitter.com/brlewis/status/618443607599661056

Intriguing phenomenon - anthropogenic glaciation.

Heh - perhaps we have stumbled upon a completely asinine, and thus human way to reform the glaciers that are melting?

When it snowed heavily in the mid-Atlantic in 2010 we had a couple giant mounds like that although not that large. Even with the higher spring time temperatures here they lasted well into June. I wouldn't be surprised if it did last until next winter.

I was working at the design center while this was going on. Totally surreal. I moved out of Boston in May. Lots of people I know have or are planning to relocate. Quite poetic that the snow has outlasted us... What a wretched, miserable couple of months. Never again.

That's interesting. I'm not even as north as Boston, about the same latitude as Philadelphia, and I'm planning to moving south too. I suspect this will be a sizeable movement.

I moved from Alberta to North Carolina. It gets hot here, really hot. If you like doing things outside, you might find there are still months where you really don't want to.

On the other hand, you don't need to scrape heat off your car, or shovel it off your drive way.

I don't remember the Canadian mounds of snow taking so much time to melt

Does anyone know the reason for the difference? Is the Boston snow more tightly compacted, from plows?

I don't think any of them get up to 75 feet high, that's probably the principal difference. Many of them last well into July, though, so I wouldn't yet say that the Boston one will last longer.

Salt content is probably also a significant factor. At least here in Ottawa the roads are very heavily salted. You need to salt much heavier to melt ice at -30C than at -10C.

If you look at some of the pictures they've got very heavy bulldozers pushing snow up the hill and excavators moving it around. It would have gotten heavily compacted as the bulldozer drove across it. It's probably more ice than snow at this point.

They do that with Canadian snow mounds too. Do they do it as much, though? Probably not.

I don't think we pile it so high, though I have never worked in whichever civil service branch handles snow so it is only based on life-experience.

I have never seen a pile so high, we have many smaller piles scattered throughout our cities: every parking lot has one, the parking lane of most roads becomes places for snow piles, just outside of town you can see fields of small piles. The snow that is actually removed from the roads, I assume they spread that out into smaller piles as well.

Those pictures of loaders on top of huge piles of snow seems particularly dangerous.

Wild guess: Boston is a densely populated city with geographic restrictions (due to the bodies of water around it). The ratio of roads needing to be cleared vs available snow dump areas might be a lot higher than in most places in Canada. Also this was a very extreme snow year for them, so it wouldn't make sense to set aside this much land for snow dumps every year.

I know it uses far too much energy to melt this snow in the middle of winter but they really could try to figure out some way to filter the rubbish out before they pile the snow up. Maybe a snow blower thing and a mesh to catch the non snow bits.

Plus it's just a bit lazy to just leave the pile there during May/June/July. Bulldoze it flat and sprinkle charcoal (or something black) on it to absorb more heat from the sun.

(Disclaimer: I've never lived somewhere with a serious snow problem)

You're not bulldozing a solid chunk of ice that large. You'll destroy the bulldozer.

So how does open demo-ing a concrete building work then? Last I heard reinforced concrete was harder than ice. Not that I want to see public funds spent on breaking it up, when the sun will do the job for free if we wait, but this isn't something that construction equipment couldn't handle.

Concrete buildings aren't solid concrete. There are still a few WW2 bunkers around these parts, because it's almost impossible to demolish them, by design. And even those aren't solid concrete by any stretch.

They did melt a significant amount of snow during the winter:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015...

I don't think you have any idea of the scale of the mound. 74 feet tall over an area of 4 acres. Filtering that would cost at least tens of millions of dollars.

And no need to sprinkle charcoal. Snow mounds quickly turn black once they start melting. There's always a little bit of dirt mixed in with the snow, which becomes concentrated as the snow melts.

What they really need to do (I live here) is triage.

When the snow piles up, people should be on notice that not all of it will be cleared. Major roads should be cleared for 2 lanes. Smaller streets, one lane. And the T should be kept fully operational. But the panicky response with front end loaders is the reason those snow piles are so full of debris and gross stuff.

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