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The short polar melt season is almost half over, and hasn’t actually begun yet.

FULL TITLE: Fancy an (icy) dip? Hundreds of Russian Orthodox Christians plunge into freezing water to 'purify their souls' as temperatures drop to -17C Hundreds of Russian Orthodox Christians have plunged into icy water around Eastern Europe to mark the feast of Epiphany. In temperatures as low as -17C, the believers wore little more than basic swimming costumes as they leapt into lakes and plunge pools to confirm their willingness to follow Jesus, who is said to have been baptised in the River Jordon. With snow piled high around the water, it’s no wonder many of the Christians grimace as...

Energy: With Ahab-like determination, environmentalists have once again blocked oil exploration in the American Arctic. They may just have succeeded in putting the American economy on ice.On Friday, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals Court panel in Washington, D.C., struck down the Bush administration's five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing off Alaska's northern coast. The plan was vacated, the panel ruled, because of allegedly insufficient environmental review because its "environmental sensitivity rankings are irrational." What is irrational is that despite a more than three-decade long record of environmental sensitivity at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere, and despite booming polar...

Icy world found inside asteroid Ron Cowen New observations of Ceres, the largest known asteroid, suggest that frozen water may account for as much as 25 percent of its interior. If this is true, the volume of ice on Ceres would be greater than that of all the fresh water on Earth. CERES SERIES. This sequence of Hubble images reveals a bright spot of unknown origin on Ceres during a quarter-turn of the asteroid's 9-hour rotation. Thomas, et al., NASA The evidence comes from Hubble Space Telescope images showing that the 930-kilometer-wide asteroid is smooth and almost perfectly round. Simulations...

The Cassini spacecraft has coasted to its closest encounter yet - skimming just 175 kilometres above Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. But astronomers are at a loss to explain its observations. On 14 July, Cassini swooped in for an unprecedented close-up view of the wrinkled moon. Its Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) camera has since returned pictures of a boulder-strewn landscape that is currently beyond explanation. The "boulders" appear to range between 10 and 20 metres in diameter in the highest-resolution images, which can resolve features just 4 m across. “That’s a surface texture I have never seen anywhere else in the...

This image from the Mars Express spacecraft shows a pocket of water ice nestling in a martian crater, bathed in the late martian summer sun. The shadow of the crater’s rim, which towers 300 metres over the surrounding plains, prevents the ice from vaporizing in the planet’s thin atmosphere. A dusting of frost survives inside the rim to the upper right, while the sun glimmers on its south-facing outer edge. The 35-kilometre-wide crater sits 70
north of the martian equator, in a low-lying region known as Vastitas Borealis. Previous orbiters have spotted ice deposits in craters, but the High Resolution...

Trying to Crack An Icy Mystery Cryogenetic Secrets May Aid Organ Transplant First, as the temperature drops below 32 degrees, ice crystals start to form just beneath the frog's skin. The normally pliant and slimy amphibian becomes  for lack of a better word -- slushy. Then, if the mercury continues to fall, ice races inward through the frog's arteries and veins. Its heart and brain stop working, and its eyes freeze to a ghostly white. "Imagine an ice cube. Paint it green," and you've got the wood frog in winter, said Ken Storey, a professor at Carleton University in...

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts. The round world is currently three times farther away than Pluto from the Sun, a distance that expands even further on its 10,000-year orbit. It sits in a part of the solar system that some astronomers had thought empty. It is redder and brighter than anything astronomers have seen in the outer solar system, and scientists don't know why. The object...

Icy claim that water has memory 19:00 11 June 03 Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists. Holding such a heretical view famously cost one of France's top allergy researchers, Jacques Benveniste, his funding, labs and reputation after his findings were discredited in 1988. Yet a paper is about to be published in...