Thursday, February 25, 2010

The failed one

We took a 1 meter piece of 1-inch thick iron water pipe with an inner diameter of 4 inches, and welded it shut on one end. Then we put it in a freezer and applied layers of clear and colored water in it through an insulated rubber tube, to simulate the yearly layers in a glacier. Then we set the pipe to an industrial grade hydraulic press that had a 1-meter 4 inch spike attached to measure the thermal conductivity, layer compression, and other physical parameters in the ice under heavy load. Unfortunately we cannot publish the results in glaciological magazine, since "glacial ice doesn't contain iron" and "the parameters measured this way cannot be applied to estimate glacial flow", and the response from solid state physics magazine was that "this is a student-level study of ice jams in hydraulic pressers" and "since you didn't measure the behavior of iron under stress, this cannot be applied to engineering." There were no further tries to publish this study, and frankly, why bother, the results in the study have some application in the current field of our research. Any relation to real persons or studies is purely coincidental.