Floating Ice Sheet Collisions Have Implications For Self-Assembling Nanostructures

From What's Next In Science & Technology:

A study reported in Physical Review Letters demonstrates how ice sheets sometimes interlace when they meet, rather than riding over or under each other, and discusses the implications for other phenomena from plate tectonics of the Earth's surface to the design of self-assembling nanostructures. "A surprising pattern, much like the meshed teeth of a zipper, is frequently seen when floating ice sheets collide," said John Wettlaufer, professor of geology & geophysics and of physics at Yale. He and his colleague Dominic Vella of Cambridge University in England demonstrated the underlying principle for the observation. Further, they suggest that the process can work for any materials that share particular physical characteristics of thickness and flexibility. "When two elastic sheets floating on a liquid collide, intuition leads us to expect one of two results — one sheet might be 'subducted' under the other, as we observe with the earth's crust, or the two might crush each other forming a field of rubble, as we observe in thick ice floes," said Wettlaufer.

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