The Library of Ice Read online

  the Authors Papers being near two years since given to be transcribed to one, whose skill in writing was much greater, than (as it afterwards appear’d) his knowledge of what was, or was not good sense, or true English; this person suddenly going for Africk before the Transcript had been examin’d, and not taking care to leave all the first copy, the Author found, (beside several Blanks, that he filled up out of his Memory, or by repeating the Experiments, they belonged to) one or two where he was not able to repair the Copyists omissions.

  The ‘very many Passages so miserably handled’ almost caused Boyle to write a new book.

  This incident was not the only cause for delay. The publisher warns the reader that while some ‘passages are so penned, as to suppose the book to be published early in the Winter’, this was misleading. While much of the book was sent to the press, Boyle held a section back. He was hoping for an opportunity to perfect an experiment that seemed essential to his subject – but he was hindered by the weather. The trouble with doing research on cold in an era before artificial refrigeration was that work was entirely dependent on the climate. ‘I was fan to Wait for, and make use of a Fit of Frosty weather (which has very long been a rarity),’ he wrote, ‘as solicitously as Pilots [of ships] watch for, and improve a Wind.’ However, the winter frosts came late in the season, and furthermore ‘the Coldness did within a while arrive at that degree, that by its operation upon the moisten’d paper, it long put a stop to the Proceedings of the Press’. (The handmade paper would be dampened to soften it, the better to compensate for uneven thickness, and increase the bite of the type and adherence of the ink. But once the moisture in the paper started freezing, printing would be impossible.) Perversely, the experiments and their publication required opposing conditions. Yet Boyle was determined to keep to his intended deadline and, at the end of 1664, ‘in the first or second week of the Frost’, he presented some copies of the incomplete version of History of Cold to the Royal Society, ‘though the Book were not then quite printed off’. Of twenty-one sections, the printer had completed around nineteen, and Boyle protested that he had the manuscript of the twentieth in his hands, ready to supply it whenever the weather should permit printing.

  ‘Cold is so barren a subject,’ Boyle opens his book unpromisingly, ‘and affords so few Experiments, that are either very delightful for their surprizing prettiness, or very considerable for their immediate use.’ Not useful or pretty then, but perhaps worth pursuing for its own sake? In a manner that is familiar in academic discourse today, he protests the importance of investigating ‘the Phænomena of Cold’, and condemns the scarce attention it has received from previous scholars – ‘they commonly take leave of the subject, as if it deserved no further handling, then could be afforded it in a few Lines’. I find his irritable tone, across the space of three hundred years, quite charming.

  Next, Boyle excuses his lack of consistent experimental method and forestalls criticism of the unequal nature of the sections in his book by pointing out that since the material covered in each of them differs so much, some must be long and others may be short. He does not want to expand the shorter ones ‘by untruths or impertinences’. He defends his prolix passages: he wants to record in detail ‘the Manner of the Trials’, either so that readers can repeat them, or at least be satisfied they are true – for often they could not be done ‘but by the help of Glasses Skilfully Shap’d, and Hermetically seal’d and other Instruments and Operation, that require more tools, and more of manual dexterity, then every ingenious Man is Master of’. He also excuses his way of working, for, ‘sometimes I wanted conveniently shap’d Glasses, sometimes the Implements necessary to seal them up with, sometimes such ingredients as I needed to work on, oftentimes frosty Weather . . . and not seldom Ice and Snow for artificial congealations; sometimes Weather-glasses, especially seal’d ones.’ The unfortunate scientist broke two weather-glasses in quick succession, which foiled a number of his experiments.

  Boyle was confident enough to admit to the imperfections of his work on Cold, and indeed confess that, had he the chance to write the book over again, he would not. ‘I have other work enough, and that of a quite other Nature upon my hands; the Truth is, that I am plainly tired with writing on this subject, having never handled any part of Natural Philosophy, that was so Troublesome, and full of Hardships, as this has proved’.

  Science can still be troublesome. This morning, the Guardian reported that a freezer malfunction at the University of Alberta in Edmonton has melted part of the world’s largest collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic. An ice core from the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island lost about a third of its mass, equivalent to about 22,000 years of history, and a core drilled from Mount Logan, Canada’s tallest mountain, saw 16,000 years melt away. The dozen cores – 1,400 metres of ice – had only recently been acquired by the university, and had been moved just a few days previously into its brand-new, custom-built, million-dollar facility. Then one of the freezers activated a high-heat alarm.

  ‘The way in which the freezer failed meant that it started to pump heat into the freezer,’ explains glaciologist Martin Sharp. ‘So it wasn’t just a question of it gradually warming up . . . It was actually quite rapidly raised to a temperature of 40°C. It was more like a changing room in a swimming pool than a freezer.

  ‘I’ve had better days, let’s say that.’

  Robert Boyle intended his frankness to encourage other scientists by proving that good work can be done without advanced instruments and ‘where the measuring of things by Ounces and Inches will serve the turn, without determining them to Lines and to Grains.’ Amateur research was of value, laying down ‘hints’ that other, more accurate trials might investigate later. Boyle was in the vanguard of Enlightenment scientists, his laboratory, a place where nature could be manipulated. He believed that ‘the History of Nature would make too slow a Progress, if it were presum’d, that none but Geometers and Mechanitians should imploy themselves about writing any part of that History.’ As someone who is neither a Geometer or a Mechanitian, I warm to his argument.

  We may take the everyday transformation of water into ice for granted, Boyle writes, but in some parts of the world where the climate is warmer men have been looked on as liars for suggesting such a thing is possible. ‘And certainly, if custom did not take away the strangeness of it, it would to us also appear very wonderful, that so great a change of Texture should be so easily and inartificially produced.’ Boyle made no assumptions in his investigations into the formation of ice and its behaviour. (After all, it had recently been suggested by Robert Hooke that ice was caused by wind.) He investigates bodies capable of freezing others; bodies that are disposed, or indisposed, to be frozen; the tendency of cold upwards or downwards; he wonders: does the degree of cold vary the compactness of the ice? (He makes enquiries of ‘an intelligent person, who lived some years in Russia’, who informs him that the ice in Russia is much harder than that in England.)

  Reading Boyle is a lesson in perseverance and close observation and imagination: the scientist as poet. He experiments on various shapes and sizes of ice. He prepares cylinders of ice (the forerunners of ice cores) by freezing water within a metal tube. He uses flat sheets of ice of uniform thickness with the sides cut parallel and cakes of ice a quarter- to an eighth-of-an-inch thick. He adds salt to the surfaces, likewise Aqua fortis (nitric acid) and Oil of Vitriol (sulfuric acid), and notes their relative effects. He judges how much weight ice can bear, and puzzles that while ice is so strong that it cannot be broken with levers or even by a man standing upon it, yet a shard of glass ‘will readily scratch it deep enough’ and even ‘common Knives would cut it, and that with great ease’. He puzzles that when he scatters salt on a sheet of ice laid out on a table, this action both melts the ice and also causes it to freeze again to the wood beneath. He even listens to the ice: ‘I once caused divers [sic] pieces of thick ice to be brought out of a cool place into a somewhat warm room, and listening, observed a noise t
o come from them, as if it had been produced by store of little cracks made in them.’

  Water is not the only liquid Boyle tries to freeze: during snowy weather, he experiments with ‘Urine, Beer, Ale, Milk, Vinegre, and French and Rhenish Wine’, finding the wine the slowest of all to become solid. He even sees what effect cold air has on ‘a strong solution of Gum Arabick, and another of white Sugar, of Alume, Vitriol, SaltPetre, and Sea salt, a strong solution of Verdegrease in fair water (which was thereby deeply coloured).’

  While Boyle protests that most of his experiments are entirely new, and not the work of others, in one respect he had to rely on hearsay. He was not able to travel to the far north to see for himself the ice formations reported in books of exploration. These ‘great Islands of Ice’ are so big as to be almost unbelievable, he says, but he never suggests his readers should not believe in them. Section XV, ‘Experiments and Observations Touching Ice’, contains some ‘Collections out of Travellers, and Navigators, into those Colder Regions, that afford much considerabler, or at least much stranger Observations concerning ice, than are to be met with in so temperate a Climate as ours.’ Boyle excuses his practice of quoting other authors, saying it is better than missing out the material altogether – especially as many of these books, being long out of print, would have been hard to procure even in England’s centres of learning. Besides, he adds, if the reader is lucky enough to find such a volume, to get to the useful matter they must labour through ‘melancholly Acounts of storms and distresses, and Ice, and Bears, and Foxes’.

  I smile. My own journals are not free of such accounts.

  Boyle considers what he has read of icebergs. Although these ‘great Islands of Ice’ are found floating in the sea, he does not think they are composed of frozen sea water, suspecting rightly that they have travelled from inland, created perhaps ‘upon the shattering of ice in Bays and straits, partly by the heat of the Sun, and partly by the Tides, may be afterwards by the winds and currents driven all up and down the seas, to parts very distant from the shore.’ His belief is supported by the tales of travellers, who melted the ice, finding it to be fresh water and good to drink. He notes comparisons of the height of icebergs to the leads of Westminster Abbey, to the tops of the masthead on ships, to steeples, and finds that they may offer mixed terrain: ‘flat in some places like vast Champions, and high in others like frightful hills.’ He believes that ice increases by the snow falling upon it (as scientists working on firn would prove). He wonders whether ‘such Hills of Ice’ are entire and solid or rather ‘vast piles or lumps, and masses of Ice, casually and rudely heap’d up and cemented by the excessive Cold, freezing them together by the intervention of the water that washes them, which piles of many pieces of Ice are not made without great Cavities intercepted, and fill’d only with Air, between the more solid Cakes or Lumps’. He considers whether the azure colour observed in ice in Nova Zembla and other regions is inherent or permanent, ‘or else one of those that are styl’d Emphatical’.

  I wonder what libraries Boyle had access to in making his selection from these narratives. The Bodleian was new in those days, and far from the encyclopaedic collection it is today. His sources range from a scholarly Latin work by the Swedish cleric Olaus Magnus, subtitled ‘a little book that more closely explains the map of the northern cold’, to the sensational tales of the Dutch explorer Gerrit de Veer – both writers who in their own way have greatly influenced the way we see the Arctic, and whose names I will encounter repeatedly in my reading.

  While I’m curious how Boyle achieved such wide-ranging research, long before the internet, I’m even more intrigued how he compiled his notes without the convenience of a digital desktop. Almost as soon as I print out an article it gets crumpled in my bag; when I pack up to move on, these accumulated papers have to be left behind. Files are only really safe when they are saved as diminutive icons on my screen. During the era in which Boyle was testing the boundaries of chemistry, other aspects of knowledge were up for debate: even how best to study. For a long time scholars had subscribed to the idea that taking notes was lazy, that memory was diminished by writing things down. When a friend of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes complained of losing his notes, Antisthenes replied, with little sympathy: ‘You should have inscribed them on your mind instead of on paper.’ Thinkers with great memories were still celebrated in Boyle’s day. John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, describes how John Birkenhead, the founder of Oxford’s short-lived Royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus, ‘had the art of locall memory; and his topiques were the chambers, &c, in All Soules colledge (about 100), so that for 100 errands, &c, he would easily remember.’ A building is a good mnemonic, especially when the building you live and work in is as labyrinthine as an Oxford college. But wouldn’t the chambers fill up? What if Birkenhead had more than a hundred things to remember? Some humanist scholars believed that the very act of writing notes helped engrave ideas on the memory and that, in addition, the existence of the note, by acting as a prompt for later, would free up space in the mind – which however well trained, was finite.

  Boyle had a good memory and poor eyesight. He did not need to take notes, but he chose to, even though in later life he required the services of an amanuensis. In an age when an orderly system represented coherent thought, Boyle seems to have been perversely, even proudly, unsystematic. While humanists advised scholars to keep a tidy commonplace book, Boyle jotted down ideas and quotations on loose sheets of paper. Sometimes these thoughts might be given order by being haphazardly bound together, or even, like those of his contemporary Francis Bacon, organized in methodical sets of one hundred, or ‘centuries’. Some of the experiments on cold, he later told a friend, went ‘in a kind of Note-book, wherein I had thrown them for my own private use.’ His tone is careless, as was his note-keeping. After Boyle’s death, John Evelyn told a mutual acquaintance William Wotton that Boyle’s bedchamber was crowded with ‘Boxes, Glasses, Potts, Chymicall & Mathematical Instruments; Bookes & Bundles of Papers.’ After later making his own inspection, Wotton concurred that ‘His Papers were truly, what he calls many Bundles of them himself a Chaos, rude & indigested many times God knows.’

  V

  My own thoughts are a chaos of facts gathered from five centuries of science. Ice is the solid state of water, I read. When water freezes to ice it increases in volume. Ice is an inorganic solid. Ice absorbs light at the red end of the spectrum. Ice is found in nature. Ice does not violate the third law of thermodynamics. The density of ice is 0.9167g/cm3 at 0°C. Its chemical formula is H2O.

  I learn that the structure of the water molecule is one of the simplest in existence: it is formed of two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom, in a shape that resembles the letter ‘v’. Simple or not, its behaviour bewilders me.

  I leave the library, crossing the Old Schools Quadrangle. The finials and crenellations of the roof are silhouetted against the last of the daylight. A glow spills onto the flagstones from the high windows. Within the reading rooms librarians are still at work, placing volumes on readers’ shelves and classifying new publications. I know there are secret chambers under the library that have grown out beneath the city to hold ever more books.

  I have been staring at diagrams of ice too long – even the library is crystallizing.

  Once you know the structure of a small part of a symmetrical crystal, I discover, you can predict its structure into infinity. Scientists have drawn up three-dimensional renderings of ice crystals, which show lattices with coloured spheres at each intersection. The spheres remind me of the decorative stone bosses that stud the soaring perpendicular vaults on the library ceiling – except that these spheres represent particles that, while even more durable than stone, cannot be seen by the naked eye. I marvel at physicists’ ability to depict the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that so few people have witnessed – although they affect us – and plot the bonds between them. They make infinitesimal bodies big enough to see and bring incomprehensible forces wit
hin our grasp. I find it hard to even conceive what the lab equipment looks like, let alone the objects under examination: a thermometer sensitive enough to measure the heat within a chemical reaction, an electron microscope which can magnify objects by a level of 10 million. Would Boyle and Kepler have envied such advanced apparatus, dependent as they were on fragile glass instruments?

  Glass is closely related structurally to an ‘amorphous’ form of water that can be made by very fast cooling of water: physicists define both as ‘disordered condensed matter’. I imagine a scientist putting a sample of this form of ice into a glass flask, containing potential disorder within yet more potential disorder, creating a kaleidoscope of potential chaos. I am surprised by how frequently I encounter the term ‘disorder’ in my reading. I realize that physicists use it more precisely than I do, not to convey chaos and confusion but rather an absence of symmetry in a system of many particles.

  Most of the ice on Earth and in the surrounding atmosphere is underpinned by the six-cornered symmetrical crystal structure that Kepler observed. It is named ice Ih – ‘h’ for the hexagonal pattern, and ‘I’ to indicate that it is only the first of many possible phases of ice. Under high pressure and at low enough temperatures the structure of ice Ih breaks down. The hydrogen bonds rearrange themselves, and a new rhombohedral lattice is formed. This phase, known as ice II, does not occur naturally on Earth – even the weight of the Antarctic ice cap exerts only one-quarter of the pressure necessary to create it. Ice II may exist in the outer solar system, perhaps in the cores of icy moons, such as Jupiter’s Ganymede. And science indicates that there may be other phases of ice in space, each characterized by a different crystalline structure: the tetragonal lattice of ice III, and rhombohedral ice IV. When Ice Ih is cooled to -213°C it transforms into ice XI, and the hydrogens in the hydrogen bonds, which are arranged at random in ice Ih, finally achieve order.