Earlier this year, Bohoken was hit with a historic winter storm, leaving over 20 inches of snow around the city. City officials quickly began one of the largest snow removal operations in recent years, leaving large snow piles in remote areas for residents to find. After a few weeks of persistent below-freezing temperatures, the sun finally peered through, and the snow slowly disappeared. At Snevets, however, the snow mountains have remained, and The Stupe has set out to discover why.
It turns out, apparently, the plows utilized this winter were made of a special material called Vibralloy, and the repetitive scraping motion of the shovel blade against the snow generated a precise frequency of mechanical vibration that fundamentally reorganized the hydrogen bonding network within the ice crystals. As a result, the shovel induced a phase transition into a rare metastable polymorph of ice, tentatively classified as Ice-XIX, or what the team is informally calling “Shovel Ice.”
Unlike conventional ice, which melts at 32°F under standard atmospheric pressure, Ice-XIX has a dramatically elevated melting point of approximately 120°F that slowly lowers as time goes by. The altered crystal structure, characterized by an anomalously rigid tetrahedral hydrogen bond geometry, means the snowpack is essentially immune to the current temperatures. It is projected that the melting point will reach 90°F by mid-July and 60°F by mid-October. By early 2027, we can say goodbye to “Shovel Ice.”…