About 4 miles E of Coudersport , inwards the town of Sweden , inwards Potter County , Pennsylvania , lies the most puzzling geological anomaly. It’s a small-scale cave , or a pit , amongst an eight-feet-wide yesteryear ten-feet-long opening inwards the ground. At the bottom of the forty-foot deep chasm is a layer of ice. Large icicles standard upwards to 25 feet long too oftentimes upwards to iii feet thick hangs from the sides too but below the cave’s mouth.
This is the Coudersport Ice Mine , i of nature’s many ice-manufacturing plants. However , different regular H2O ice caves that degree alone inwards wintertime , the H2O ice inwards Coudersport Ice Mine forms during the warmest flavor of the year. The H2O ice starts to degree inwards boundary , increasing inwards book equally the weather condition gets hotter too hotter. When wintertime arrives too in that location is snowfall too H2O ice everywhere , too when it would appear to last the most natural fourth dimension for H2O ice formation , the H2O ice inwards Coudersport Ice Mine melts away to nothing.
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What causes this bizarre conduct is largely a mystery , but the electrical flow prevailing theory states that during wintertime , mutual coldness air slips into the middle of the mount through cracks inwards the stone formation , too due to the odd interconnection of the crevices hither , that mutual coldness air gets concentrated into chambers such equally this one. When this mutual coldness air comes inwards contact amongst percolating groundwater , H2O ice is formed. This happens alone during boundary too summertime because of the availability of groundwater during these seasons.
As wintertime approaches , the mount i time once to a greater extent than starts taking mutual coldness air too slow pushes out the warm air that had larn trapped inwards the rocks from the preceding summer. As the warm escapes through the H2O ice cave , it melts the H2O ice from the summer.
The Coudersport Ice Mine was discovered inwards 1894 yesteryear a silvery prospector named John Dodd , too the mysterious annual phenomenon had perplexed him. According to an article published inwards March 1913 , inwards Popular Science Monthly , Dodd had conducted a few experiments of his own:
He says that 2 sticks of dynamite were placed close 8 feet dorsum into a crevice at the bottom of the shaft too fired without turning a stone or dislodging whatsoever populace inwards the shaft. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 possible decision is that in that location is a cave underneath the mine large plenty to absorb the stupor of the explosion.
Later , Dodd made an opening inwards the hillside x feet deep yesteryear 20 across , too institute crevices inwards the stone from which he collected H2O ice weighing 20 too twenty-five pounds. These crevices are the ones that mayhap trap too convey mutual coldness air into the H2O ice cave. Dodd’s litter experiment besides shows that H2O ice forms non alone within the cave but within the crevices equally well.
The mine was relatively unknown at the fourth dimension the article was published. Today , it’s a curious footling attraction. While you lot can’t expire into the cave itself , you lot tin can hit get together closed to a wooden platform too lean over the metallic railing that surrounds a small-scale opening lead over the H2O ice mine too relish the whiffs of cool breeze that comes from below.
Photo credit: www.pri.org
Sources: Wikipedia / www.pri.org / Mother Nature Network / Popular Science Monthly