On Aug 31, 2008, at 4:07 PM, Terry Blanton wrote:
This reminds me of how GA red clay, when saturated with water, would have ice columns grow during the freezing night and lift a layer of clay. The little white column growing on the right looks just like one of those ice columns. Terry
The microscope stage is a solid surface. If something saturated with water is on it then it arrived in the form of dust. However, anything that remains there 25 days is definitely not water saturated clay, because at that low pressure it would sublimate quickly. The second photo was taken at 17:21 local time, long after any daily frost would have gone, be it water or CO2.
I'm not sure which is the white "column" to which you refer. Is it the white stuff in the clip below?
<<inline: landmark.png>>
Looking at the first photo, http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_17626.jpgthe width of the large white spot is about 7 pixels. At 3.91 microns/ pixel, that's 27.4 microns, or 2.74x10^-5 m, or about a thousandth of an inch wide. That is a very small dot. The diameter of a human hair ranges from 17 to 181 microns.
Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
