[deanclatworthy]

> I needed to find pure ice.

No you didn't. You could have done this with warm distilled water, then frozen, at home and had better results. But I suppose it's a good excuse to go to Iceland :) (If there was ever a need for an excuse!)

[jws]

Or contact your local ice sculpture company. They have special ice freezers for making large, clear blocks of ice.

But I’d much rather make an ice lens on an arctic beach from an iceberg than walk a couple blocks and get an off cut from the ice sculptors.

[xfitm3]

You can also make (mostly) clear ice by increasing the time it takes to freeze, such as freezing water inside a cooler.

[wlesieutre]

You need to control the direction of the freezing. As water freezes it will push the dissolved air out, and if it's freezing inward from the outside faces (like a normal ice cube tray) those bubbles end up pushed inside your ice block.

Using a cooler means the sides and bottom are insulated from the cold and won't start freezing as quickly. As it freezes top down there won't be any bubbles stuck there.

Demo on clear ice using a cooler from Cocktail Chemistry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHcCHbgX_o

[chongli]

Another trick is to drill holes in the bottom of the wells of an ice cube tray and rest the tray on a frame above the bottom of a basin. You fill the water up so that it's level with the top of the tray. When the water freezes, the air gets forced down through the holes in the bottom of the tray. Then you can chip the tray out and remove your clear ice cubes.

[heelix]

I find boiling the water does wonders too. Left overs from the kettle, room temp, make for clear ice cubes.

[hilbert42]

Hacker News is so wonderful, there's a never-ending array of amazing ideas to be found within these readers' posts.

I wonder if patent trolls ever snoop around here. ;-)

[sandworm101]

Because recently boiled water has far less dissolved gasses. So no bubbles.

[DonHopkins]

10,000 year old glacier ice has much cleaner water memory.

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

(No Homeo! ;)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=no%20homeo

[akiselev]

Yes and it wants to tell everyone to get off its lawn so that it can melt in pesce.

[ChuckMcM]

But then it wouldn't be "10,000 years old" :-)

[delinka]

>Iceland glaciers takes 10 000 years to purify the particles inside the ice.

There's lots going on there, none of which I am a fan.

[ChuckMcM]

Hence the :-) in my comment. What I took from the article was the wonder the author felt at "touching" history in this way. It is similar to picking up a fossil and knowing that a very long time ago something lived and died and you are now holding its imprint from so long ago. Many people I know have had a moment in their life where the concept of how fleeting our lives are really struck them to their core. Often it comes with a change in outlook on the value of their remaining time on the planet.

[zeristor]

Like seeing ammonite fossil shells in the paving stone of shopping centres.

I wonder where fossilised humans will turn up in 200 million years...

[ChuckMcM]

I wondered if you could actually do something not quite like that, which is create a quartz version of yourself and then embed that in a chunk of concrete or something and bury it so that 10,000 years from now someone could "unpack" it.

[hughes]

Where are you finding young water? Do you have a hydrogen fuel cell?

[hutzlibu]

The ice stayed in this form that long .. so it is old.

[munk-a]

As opposed to the young ice?

"Get yer fresh atoms! Synthesized from energy that was created just this morning! Fresh atoms for sale!"

[biztos]

Or get one of these ice kits:

https://www.studioneat.com/products/neaticekit

[lbotos]

Hilariously I went on this tangent last night, and you can do this with a cooler, to give you "directional freezing" which I also heard people call "lake effect freezing". I'm trying it out this weekend for fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHcCHbgX_o

[biztos]

Wow, thanks for that! I actually have a few of those exact same spherical ice molds. If I can find a cooler small enough to fit in my euro-freezer I'll have to give this a try.

[skwb]

Holy crap $60?! Talk about a unitasker. There's plenty of great resources to make clear cocktail ice without needing to spend any extra money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNohIFrbkXM

[baldfat]

I was thinking the same thing and go to Minnesota in Winter where the life span of the lens would be four months long.

[mhalle]

Except for sublimation, unfortunately.

[baldfat]

yeah, 24 hours MAYBE?